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Ron Ford

Ron Ford (born September 14, 1958 in Bremerton, Washington) is an American film director, producer, writer and actor, best known for Hollywood Mortuary and The Fear. (Others?). Most of his films have been released as independent, direct-to-video movies, a great many of them in the horror comedy genre.

Besides writing, acting and directing, he has worked in many roles on different feature films, including cinematographer, film editing and special effects.

Ford created the Fat Free Features film studio. He has produced nearly all of the films he directed. A reviewer for the website Moria wrote, "Ford knows how to direct his actors – most of them being relative amateurs – and gets finely nuanced performances from them."

Early life
Ford is the son of. . . He attended high school at. ..

(Other interesting facts)

Ron Ford received a Drama degree from Olympic College in 1980, where he was nominated for the Irene Ryan acting award for his performance as Dodge in Sam Shepard's Buried Child. He wrote a play, Outlaws, which was produced for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and was nominated for the David Library Literary Award.

In 1983, Ron married Paula Pointer, who played his wife in Buried Child. In 1985 they moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Ron worked on the production crew of many motion pictures (including Can't Buy Me Love and World Gone Wild) in many capacities, from driver to make-up artist. There he got his first professional acting roles in the TV series Hey Dude and The Young Riders. He made a public-access television video of Forrest J Ackerman's Lon Chaney, Jr. (Is this right?) story Letter to an Angel. Ackerman appeared as narrator in the short, which won an award in the American Film Institute's 1985 Visions of U.S.(?) competition. In 1990, Ron and Paula Pointer-Ford moved to Los Angeles.

Acting career
Ford's other stage-acting includes The Elephant Man, Lend Me a Tenor, Neil Simon's Chapter Two, and As You Like It. He told an interviewer, "My training is on the stage, and I am still not all that comfortable in front of a camera. Stage acting, however, is what I do best, and is my first love."

Film
Ford's filming trademarks include. ..

He told an interviewer, "Comedy is one of my strong points, I think. But in the low-end movie arena in which I normally work, the distributors want easily exploitable genres -- horror, action, sex -- or they don't want them at all. Nobody wants a comedy without a name actor in the lead, and who can afford that? So I will occasionally make a comedy disguised as a horror film. Not to say that I am not a horror aficionado, though. I [grew] up on horror and I love the genre." He has also said that he feels "that I have been pigeonholed as somebody who can reliably deliver a marketable picture, and people have come to depend on me for that. Of course I would like to move up to larger budgets and bigger rewards. Until then, I will keeping plugging away, making movies any way I can."

He has listed as some of his cinematic influences F. W. Murnau, James Whale, Tod Browning, Jacques Tourneur, Terence Fisher, David Cronenberg, and Martin Scorsese ("a master at horror imagery!").

Ford has written film reviews for the Cinema Head Cheese website.

Personal life
Ford has lived chiefly in Washington State...

Collaborations
Ford has cast certain actors in more than one of his films. Ford frequently collaborates with Valerie Bernardinelli, Roxanne Coyne, Wes Deitrick, Randal Malone, Tim Sullivan, and ...

[Use example of Sam Raimi.]

Honors and awards
Ford has earned the Irene Ryan acting award (Is there an official name?) and the 1992 Christopher Columbus Screenplay Discovery Award (ditto).

(Also cited, need citations:)

Ed Wood Memorial Film Festival, Best Special Effect, Hollywood Mortuary 1999

So. Cal. Motion Picture Council "Golden Halo" Best Independent Director Hollywood Mortuary 1998

Theatrical Angel Award, Hollywood Mortuary 1998

So. Cal. Motion Picture Council "Golden Halo" Best Independent Director Alien Force 1997

Christopher Columbus Screenplay Discovery Award 1993

Lucky Charms Video Award, 1993

Ford was a guest at the 2002 ShockerFest film festival.

Quotes
"I like the old monster movies the best, really. I grew up on Universal, Hammer and Roger Corman... Perhaps the three finest horror films Universal ever produced: The Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man. Refreshments?  Just some stale bread, cigars and cheap wine. 'Wine... Goooood!'"

Critical response
Film director and producer David DeCoteau, who played a role in Hollywood Mortuary, told an interviewer, "Ron is very clever and a hard worker and he has aligned himself with a great group of people who really want him to succeed. There is a family feel to his sets and he know exactly what he wants and gets it done. Ron is a doer not a talker."

The Moria website review said of Dead Season that it is "like a 1960s psycho-thriller – one of the sorts of films made by William Castle, Hammer Films or even Robert Aldrich – albeit filtered through a certain indie film eccentricity... Certainly for a low-budget independent filmmaker, Ron Ford has made Dead Season with considerable professional polish. The video photography is slick and Ford knows how to direct his actors – most of them being relative amateurs – and gets finely nuanced performances from them. Dead Season is a film that vies between genuine thriller twists and an offbeat sense of black humour, where Ford quite pleasurably leaves one in a position of constantly twisting and turning and not letting one have any idea where things are going... Dead Season becomes a very odd couple psycho-thriller, although by no means unappealingly so. It is a thriller told with sufficient twists and enough quirky originality to rate rather well."

A reviewer of The Fear called the film a "campy thriller done in the tradition of an old Ed Wood movie."

A reviewer for Blockbuster.com wrote about Alien Force, "Fans of the Batman TV series may giggle at seeing Burt Ward as the Omnipresent Praxima, ruler of a distant planet, in this silly sci-fi effort from Ron Ford, the director of Mark of Dracula. The real star is Tyrone Wade, as an alien warrior sent to Earth to get an egg containing the energies of a near-extinct race of parasitic bad guys... Those familiar with Ford's other films may be either delighted or dismayed to see film star Randal Malone, whose mincing portrayal of Raleigh here would make Franklin Pangborn turn over in his grave."