User:Damian Cuthburt

Damian Cuthburt Damien Arthur Cuthburt (May 7, 1935-August 23, 2010) was an English Film director and documentary maker. He is frequently cited as one of the worst directors of the 20th century due to the consistently bad films, documentaries and TV shows that he directed between 1957 and 1999. His film making style involves over-the-top violence and humor which is frequently considered by many as being completely not efficacious in achieving its intended goals. '''Early Life and family Damian Arthur Cuthburt was born in Basingstoke, a town in Hampshire, South England on May 7, 1935. His father, Jonothan Donald Cuthburt (1904-1985) was a Urologist of Australian descent and his mother (1902-1997), Brenda Warnock, was an English Teacher who was originally from Inverness in Scotland. He had one older sister called Helen (1932-2009) and a younger brother called Joe (1940-). Cuthburt's grandfather was an Australian clothes merchant who moved to England in 1901 and settled in Bristol. He joined the British Army as a private in August 1914, soon after the outbreak of the First World War and was killed in action in 1918, two weeks after being promoted to sergeant.

Many who were present during his childhood described Damien as an inept and unmotivated boy, characteristics that would not help him later on in life. At Secondary School, he was allegedly (according to his family) completely uninterested and subsequently dropped out of education at the age of 15. Up until he was 18, Cuthburt worked at his local cinema, on the concessions stand. Here he apparently gained an avid love for the world of cinema and soon became extremely enthusiastic about joining the industry.

Career In February 1955, he began his film making career when he purchased a full-set of filming equipment with a fairly substantial loan from his father, on promises that he would one day be successful and pay him back. With this money, Damien also employed a small cast of actors from the local theater. In his auto-biography ('My Life in Cinema'), that was published in 2000, he admits that this first attempt at making a movie was an 'utter shambles' and a 'resounding failure'. The film was aimed at being a comedy about two brothers fighting each other over ownership of a stray dog, and was titled 'Give me back my dog'. Production took a long time to get under way, with actors reportedly waiting almost 7 weeks to begin filming, whilst Damien experienced writer's block, and once the process began, it all soon fell apart. He was woefully inexperienced and according to local a journalist who reported on the production, his team lacked any basic structure and discipline, with Damien commonly miss-communicating his intentions for the film to his actors and poorly managing the small budget. Countless sums of money were wasted on props that never featured in the end product. Some of these included a Napoleonic War-era artillery cannon and thirty-foot tall fake rubber trees which Cuthburt later realized he could not make us of since the entire narrative was based inside a church. The result of countless shortcomings was 'sudden and violent outbursts of sheer rage' by the director and resentment on the behalf of his producer, Brian McDonnell, who felt the gross miss-handling of the financial side of events would ultimately culminate in the failure of the movie. McDonnell was not wrong and when the film was hastily released on its November 29 deadline that year, a lack of investment in marketing led to low viewing figures and those who did watch it, branded the film as 'uninspiring' and 'tedious'. The exact amount is unknown, but 'Give me back my dog' made very little at the box office. Moreover, this was only exacerbated by the fact that almost all of the profit was used to repay fines placed upon him when actors damaged public property and inadvertently burned down the local town park, during a shoot in mid-June.

Cuthburt later fell out with his producer in early November 1955, when he discovered that Damien had slashed his wage for that year in order to compensate with the large quantity of fines that were levied by the local council. McDonnell subsequently went to court with the intention to sue his director over this issue. The end result was Cuthburt being forced to pay compensation. This sum was payed off in 1956 when Damien was forced to sell all of his filming equipment.