Joseph Strick 1923-2010

Text: Aidan Mac Guill
Image: BFI

Joseph Strick died in Paris this month.  Screen-writer, director, producer and bete noire of censors, he emerged alongside contemporaries like Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes as part of the American New Wave in the 1950s.

Having served as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces during World War II, his first film was 'Muscle Beach' in 1948, a documentary dealing with body-builders in California. In 1959, along with Ben Maddow and Sidney Meyers, he produced and directed 'The Savage Eye', a drama filmed in a verite documentary style. This landmark of film-making, a satire on the effects of consumerism in American culture and morality, won him a BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award.

Strick cemented his reputation as a fearless and independent artist with his trio of  adaptations of supposedly unfilmable literary works. In 1963 he directed 'The Balcony', his treatment of Jean Genet's allegorical play set in a brothel. 4 years later Strick travelled to Ireland to take on James Joyce's modernist epic 'Ulysses'. Alongside his lifelong friend and collaborator Fred Haines he crafted a script which included only Joyce's original words. Strick's initial plan for an 18 hour film was understandably, if sadly, rejected by his financial backers. The cast was chocked full of Irish acting talent, with Milo O'Shea in the role of Leopold Bloom.

It received overwhelmingly positive reviews, earning Strick and Haines Oscar nominations for their screenplay. The censors however were not as receptive. the British Board of Film Censors demanded nearly 30 cuts. Stricks response was to replace all the banned material with a black screen and a high-pitched shrieking sound. The board relented. When Strick realised some of the subtitles had been cut when the film was screened at Cannes, he stormed the projection booth and switched off the machine. After a scuffle, security guards ejected him down a flight of stairs, breaking his ankle. In New Zealand men and women were required to attend separate screenings and famously Irish cinemas were banned from showing it until as recently as the year 2000.

Mr. Strick followed this with his adaption of Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'. Filmed around Paris in 1969, the film starred Rip Torn. Strick remained faithful to the graphic sexual nature of the book, and ran afoul of the censor's again. "What goods a movie if you can't corrupt a 16 year old," Strick contended. He eventually filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Motion Picture Association of America seeking to overturn the X rating it had given the film.

In 1970 he won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject for 'Interviews With My Lai Veterans', which he wrote, produced and directed. He interviewed veterans who had witnessed the massacre of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians by American forces on March 16, 1968. 

His other films included another Joyce adaption 'A Portrait Of The Artist as a Young Man'  and 'Ring of Bright Water'. Strick was also a successful businessman, founding numerous companies and inventing the machines now used in Disney theme parks as Star Tours. He directed at the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre in London, and at the Granary Theatre in Cork.

Joseph Strick July 6, 1923 – June 2, 2010

Comments

[Soph*]

Thanks for this Vingt! Very insightful!