Richard Rush (director)

Richard Rush (April 15, 1929 – April 8, 2021) was an American film director, scriptwriter, and producer. He is known for directing The Stunt Man, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. His film Color of Night won a Golden Raspberry Award as the worst film of 1994, but Maxim magazine also singled the film out as having the best sex scene in film history. Rush, whose directing career began in 1960, also directed Freebie and the Bean, a police buddy comedy/drama starring Alan Arkin and James Caan. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1990 film Air America.

Early life
Rush spent his childhood fascinated by Marcel Proust and Batman comics. He was one of the first students of UCLA's film program, and after graduation showcasing the nation's involvement in the Korean War. While he agreed with the military's involvement in the region, Rush's participation in this conflict can be seen as a defining event for the director who later explained: There's a recurring theme that I keep getting attracted to in film. . . . Being unable to accept truth, we have a tendency to accept systems, and to believe in a series of learned homilies and arbitrary rituals of good and evil, right and wrong. Magic, king, country, mother, God, all those burning truths we got from our early bathroom training from bumper stickers and from crocheted pillow cases. When it's right to kill. When it's not right to kill. Under what circumstances. Arbitrary rules invented for the occasion. And we really dedicate ourselves to them ferociously. And they tend to obscure any real human feeling or any real morality that might emerge to substitute for it. After his military-related work, Rush opened a production company to produce commercials and industrial films.

Early Features
At the age of thirty, inspired by the neo-realism of French director François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Rush sold his production business to finance his first feature Too Soon to Love (1960), which he produced on a shoestring budget of $50,000 and sold to Universal Pictures for distribution for $250,000. It featured an early film appearance by Jack Nicholson (who starred in two later Rush films, Hells Angels on Wheels and Psych-Out).

Rush wanted to follow it with an adaptation of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? but did not end up making the film. He was also attached to Kitten with a Whip early on.

Rush then directed Of Love and Desire (1963) with Merle Oberon.

Exploitation Films
Rush's third movie was a spy picture, A Man Called Dagger (1966) which was his first collaboration with cinematographer László Kovács.

Rush directed a car racing film for American International Pictures, Thunder Alley (1967) starring Fabian Forte and Annette Funicello.

He did The Fickle Finger of Fate (1967) for Sidney W. Pink starring Tab Hunter, then did a biker movie for Joe Solomon, Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), starring Nicholson.

Rush was signed by Dick Clark to make two more films for AIP: Psych-Out (1968), a film about the counter culture starring Nicholson and Susan Strasberg, and a biker movie The Savage Seven (1968).

Studio Films
Rush signed a deal with Columbia Pictures. His first studio effort was 1970's Getting Straight, starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen. The film did well commercially and was deemed by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to be the "best American film of the decade."

Rush's next movie, in 1974, was Freebie and the Bean. For the most part, Freebie was critically panned; however, it was enormously popular with audiences, grossing $12.5 million at the box office on a $3 million budget in the two years following its release.

Rush was hired to direct One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) after its original director Miloš Forman was placed under increasing censorship and StB surveillance by the normalization-era Communist Party government of Czechoslovakia. However, he was replaced by Hal Ashby after he was unable to secure studio funding, and Ashby was later replaced by Forman after he fled to the United States.

The Stunt Man
In 1981, Truffaut was asked "Who is your favorite American director?" He answered, "I don’t know his name, but I saw his film last night and it was called The Stunt Man." The film, which took Rush nine years to put together, was a slapstick comedy, a thriller, a romance, an action-adventure, and a commentary on America's dismissal of veterans, as well as a deconstruction of Hollywood cinema. The film also features Rush's typical protagonist, an emotionally traumatized male who has escaped the traditional frameworks of society only to find his new world (biker gangs in Hells Angels on Wheels, hippies in Psych-Out) corrupted by the same influences. The Stunt Man won Rush Oscar nominations for best director and best script (co-nominated with Lawrence B. Marcus).

Later career
Rush originally wanted to direct the horror comedy Love at First Bite (1979) as his first film after The Stunt Man, but was replaced by Stan Dragoti. In 1985, Rush was hired by Carolco Pictures to direct Air America (1990) with Sean Connery and Kevin Costner starring. When the film was delayed to avoid competition with Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and when Connery and Costner's salaries became too expensive, Rush was paid full salary to walk away from the project by Daniel Melnick. This allowed the studio to cast Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr. and turn the film into a success, grossing nearly double its budget.

Rush did not direct another film for four years, until the 1994's box office failure Color of Night. However, Color of Night also won "Best Sex Scene in film history" award from Maxim magazine; Rush was very proud of the award, and he kept the award in his bathroom.

Afterward, Rush retreated from the world of commercial cinema. As Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times wrote, Rush's career seems to be "followed by the kind of miserable luck that never seems to afflict the untalented."

His last project was a DVD documentary on the making of The Stunt Man entitled The Sinister Saga of Making The Stunt Man (2001).

He resided in Bel Air with his wife Claudia. He had an older brother, Dr. Stephen Rush who also resided in Los Angeles.

On April 8, 2021, Rush died a week shy of his 92nd birthday at his Los Angeles home after long-term health problems.