What filmmaker is most intertwined with your childhood?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by finslaw, Nov 23, 2022.

  1. finslaw

    finslaw muzak to my ears Thread Starter

    Location:
    Indiana
    Maybe now as sophisticated and deep-thinking (cough-pretentious) adults we regard the Criterion crowd as favorites (Kubrick, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman etc) but I am willing to bet that isn't where our movie watching started. So what filmmaker most gives you those nostalgic vibes? This will of course depend heavily on ages of people, my childhood movie-watching heyday being the late 80's and into the early 90's.

    For me it would be easy to go with biggies like Carpenter, Spielberg or Dante, but there is one filmmaker that somehow managed to infiltrate my childhood with nearly everything he touched, I present Fred Dekker in chronology from 1983 to 1993:
    • The Return of Godzilla - he wrote a script for a stop-motion 3D Americanized Godzilla movie to be directed by Steve Miner (Friday the 13th 3D) It just missed getting made and some elements went into Godzilla 1985 which was my entry way Godzilla movie.
    • Night of the Creeps - Written and directed by. How fun is this movie? A frat teen romance/comedy with Alien slugs and zombies. A rightful cult classic I used to sell on VHS for $40 before it went on DVD. "Thrill Me."
    • House - Story by. This is another kitchen sink horror movie that may be the most fun movie about war PTSD.
    • House II - Story by. Not one I watched much, but famously called better than the first in Scream 2.
    • The Monster Squad - Written and directed by. Saw it in our Mall's theater and fell in love. A perennial Halloween favorite, showed it to my daughter and she cried when Franky went bye bye. "Wolfman's got nards."
    • Tales from the Crypt: And All Through the House - Written by. Maybe a show too adult for me at the time, however, this Killer Santa episode is easily my most watched.
    • Ricochet - Story by. One of my most watched action films of my youth, the ridiculousness just hammered it home. Denzel and Lithgow were great.
    • If Looks Could Kill - Story by. James Bond Jr. Saw this at the dollar theater late night with my dad and loved it. A bit underrated.
    • Demolition Man - Uncredited script (he added the prologue.) Another favorite as a kid, the future stuff is incredibly funny.
    But then as I turned 14 and Dekker made exactly one mistake and never really recovered: Robocop 3. A PG-13 sequel without Weller!!! It tanked. Since then he did some script stuff for Lethal Weapon 4 (adding the car driving through the skyscraper) and Titan AE. Having a connection with Shane Black they both worked on Edge and The Predator which was a disappointment.
     
  2. Joseph LeVie

    Joseph LeVie Forum Resident

    Location:
    South Florida
    If it's my childhood, then, probably Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen. My mother was very in to movies and I probably saw all of them from my toddler years until my middle school years.
     
    AC1 likes this.
  3. maclen

    maclen Senior Member

    I don’t know who the filmmaker is but this transports me right back to childhood .
     
  4. finslaw

    finslaw muzak to my ears Thread Starter

    Location:
    Indiana
    I have weirdly fond memories of Woody Allen's Sleeper from a time I didn't get a lot of the jokes. You must have had much more patience than me if you liked watching Kubrick as a pre-teen.
     
    Ghostworld, Joseph LeVie and altaeria like this.
  5. Doctor Worm

    Doctor Worm Romans 6:23

    Location:
    Missouri
    Spielberg would probably be the first on my list, mainly due to Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park.
     
    poe_man, MikaelaArsenault and finslaw like this.
  6. mbd40

    mbd40 Steely Dan Fan

    Location:
    Hope, Ar
    Probably Robert Zemeckis.

    Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future were family favorites that got a lot of play when I was a kid.
     
  7. finslaw

    finslaw muzak to my ears Thread Starter

    Location:
    Indiana
    Yeah he was hard to overlook. Honestly, if you include all his producing works then he would be a shoe-in, especially for anyone who grew up in the 80's.

    I loved watching Romancing the Stone on TV when I was a kid, my favorite part being the long crashed plane with the skeleton pilot. Hell, anything with a skeleton was a favorite, House on Haunted Hill, Jason and the Argonauts or the one in the waiting room of Beetlejuice.
     
    Last edited: Nov 23, 2022
  8. Joseph LeVie

    Joseph LeVie Forum Resident

    Location:
    South Florida
    The imagery of Kubrick was breathtaking to me.

    Sleeper stood out to me. I saw it at a drive in double feature with Take The Money And Run. It all just seemed hilarious to me.
     
    finslaw likes this.
  9. planetexpress

    planetexpress Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity.

    Location:
    Chicago
    Harder question to answer than I initially thought. I would've been in my teens by the time we got cable / VHS so my choices are actually pretty limited.

    Steven Spielberg is the obvious choice for having his hands involved with: Amazing Stories, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Goonies, Gremlins, Back to the Future, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Money Pit, Innerspace, The Blues Brothers, The Never Ending Story. No one else really even comes close...
     
    Vic_1957 and Silverwolf like this.
  10. GregM

    GregM The expanding man

    Location:
    Bay Area, CA
    Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders. Those were the big ones for me. In college it was more about Scorsese.
     
    Silverwolf and finslaw like this.
  11. Stencil

    Stencil Forum Resident

    Location:
    Lockport, IL
    The Dr Who and the Daleks movies with Peter Cushing. They were on everynight for a week and I watched every night.

    Also Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus.
     
    Ghostworld and finslaw like this.
  12. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    I'd probably have to go with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, since the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films were basically the foundations on which my childhood was built.
     
  13. From childhood? Walt Disney. The 1960s.
     
  14. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    Childhood would be Chuck Jones. Even as a little kid watching the various Loony Tunes Saturday morning, I recognized those with his name were the "good" ones . . .
     
  15. Jazzmonkie

    Jazzmonkie Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tempe, AZ
    Charles Barton, director The Shaggy Dog and several Abbott & Costello movies including A&C Meet Frankenstein which was my first Frankenstein movie. He also directed many TV show episodes from my childhood.
     
    finslaw likes this.
  16. Instant Dharma

    Instant Dharma Dude/man

    Location:
    CoCoCo, Ca
    Gotta go Speilberg/Lucas as well, then later on Zemeckis and John Hughes.
     
    finslaw likes this.
  17. finslaw

    finslaw muzak to my ears Thread Starter

    Location:
    Indiana
    Nice. For similar reasons I have nostalgia for Erle C. Kenton due to my childhood favorite A & C film Who Done It? and Universal monster movie House of Frankenstein.
     
    Jazzmonkie likes this.
  18. SPF2001

    SPF2001 a must to avoid

    Location:
    St. Petersburg,Fl.
    Starting in 1964,probably Richard Lester.
     
    finslaw likes this.
  19. Jazzmonkie

    Jazzmonkie Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tempe, AZ
    Who Done It is one of my faves too.
     
    finslaw likes this.
  20. DankFridge

    DankFridge Forum Resident

    Location:
    Seattle, WA
    I am an American in my mid 30s so definitely Spielberg.
     
  21. finslaw

    finslaw muzak to my ears Thread Starter

    Location:
    Indiana
    Peter Hyams has a filmography littered with childhood memories. Lots of action like Capricorn One, Telecom, The Hunter, Outland, 2010, Running Scared, The Presidio, Narrow Margin, Timecop, Sudden Death, plus films in other genres I watched often like Stay Tuned and The Relic.
     
    DankFridge likes this.
  22. AC1

    AC1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Antwerp, Belgium
    When I was a kid, TV and cinema weren't geared towards children yet, so I was raised with mostly classsics (every saturday afternoon) and Seventies movies. Back then I wasn't thinking about who directed those movies. Wizard Of Oz was almost a yearly tradition and I saw it every time. The next big movie for me was Star Wars, which is sort of an 'updated' version of The Wizard Of Oz, but by then I was already 14. I would say what formed me the most is the social drama of the late Sixties and the Seventies.
     
  23. eric777

    eric777 Astral Projectionist

    There are several.

    Steven Spielberg
    John Carpenter
    Clive Barker
    Robert Zemeckis
    Wes Craven
    Ridley Scott

    My favorite has always been James Cameron
     
    finslaw likes this.
  24. Barnabas Collins

    Barnabas Collins Senior Member

    Location:
    NH
    Without a doubt, Bert I Gordon. I saw The Amazing Colossal Man, The Spider, The Cyclops and Village of the Giants before Star Wars or Close Encounters.
     
  25. 64FALCON

    64FALCON Forum Resident

    BERT I. GORDON is still alive. He's 100 now.
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2022

Share This Page

molar-endocrine