Bob Rafelson
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Bob Rafelson Robert "Bob" Rafelson (born February 21, 1933) is an American film director, writer and producer. He is regarded as one of the founders of the New Hollywood movement in the 1970s. Among his best- known films are Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). He was also one of the creators of the pop group and TV series The Monkees with Raybert/BBS Productions partner Bert Schneider. His first wife was the production designer Toby Carr Rafelson. His eldest son is songwriter Peter Rafelson, who co- wrote the hit song "Open Your Heart" for Madonna. Early life Rafelson was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of a hat ribbon manufacturer. His uncle was screenwriter and playwright Samson Raphaelson, the author of The Jazz Singer, who wrote nine films for director Ernst Lubitsch.[3] "Samson took an interest in my work," Rafelson told critic David Thomson. "If he liked a picture, then I was his favorite nephew. But if he didnt like it, I was a distant cousin!"[4] Rafelson had an older brother, Donald, and attended Trinity-Pawling School on scholarship. As a teenager he would often run away from home to pursue a more adventurous lifestyle, including riding in a rodeo in Arizona and playing in a jazz band in Acapulco. After studying philosophy at Dartmouth College (where he had made friends with screenwriter Buck Henry),Rafelson was drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed in Japan. In Japan he worked as a disk jockey, translated Japanese films and was an adviser to the Shochiku Film Company as to what films would be financially successful in the United States.[6] In an interview with critic Peter Tonguette, he said he was fascinated by the films he saw in Japan: "I'd have to watch an Ozu movie over and over again--say, Tokyo Story--and I was hypnotized by the stillness of his frames, his sureness of composition," he said. "So I suppose my own aesthetic evolved from looking at certain kinds of pictures--Bergman and Ozu and John Ford, if you will." Rafelson began dating Toby Carr in high school and they later married in the mid-1950s. The couple had two children: Peter Rafelson, born in 1960, and Julie Rafelson, born in 1962. Toby Rafelson was a production designer on many films, including her husband's Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, and Stay Hungry, as well as Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard. Early television career Rafelson's first professional job was as a story editor on the TV series Play of the Week for producer David Susskind in 1959. The series produced televised stage plays from contemporary and classical authors. Rafelson's job required him to read hundreds of plays, select which were to be produced, and write some additional dialogue uncredited. Rafelson's first writing credits were for an episode of the TV series The Witness in 1960 and an episode of the series The Greatest Show on Earth in 1963. In June 1962, Rafelson and his family moved to Hollywood where he began working as an associate producer on television shows and films at Universal Pictures, Revue Productions, Desilu Productions and Screen Gems.[5] After an argument with Lew Wasserman over creative differences on the show Channing, culminating in Rafelson sweeping "awards, medallions, souvenir ashtrays, and other tchotchkes" from Wasserman's desk, he was fired.[10] Wasserman told him to come back when he learned that "film was a collaborative process." While working on the TV series The Wackiest Ship in the Army for Screen Gems in 1965, Rafelson met fellow producer Bert Schneider. They became fast friends and created the company Raybert Productions together that year. Raybert would later become BBS Productions and produce films as a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. Encouraged by the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night and Beatlemania in general, Rafelson and Schneider's first project was a television series about a rock 'n' roll group.[11] However, Rafelson said, "I had conceived the show before The Beatles existed," and it was based on his time as an itinerant musician more "interested in having fun" than "in earning a living." [7]Raybert Productions sold the idea to Screen Gems and, when they were unable to get either the Dave Clark Five or the Lovin' Spoonful for the show, ran ads in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for musicians. The band that they created was The Monkees and the series ran from 1966 until 1968. The Monkees was immediately a success with audiences and, despite the band being a manufactured product, was particularly popular with the youth demographic at the time.[6] Rafelson and Schneider won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series as producers in 1967. Rafelson has said that "the whole show was created in effect in the editing room. The tempo was of paramount importance...I had to direct one or two of the shows for television to set the pattern of how these things should be made." Rafelson had said that "of the first thirty-two shows, twenty-nine were directed by people who had never directed before- including me. So the idea of using new directors not perhaps too encumbered by traditional ways of thinking was initiated on that series and just continued on the movies we made later." He has cited the series' "radically different way of cutting and doing a half hour comedy because there were interviews that were interspersed [and] there was documentary footage." Early film career Rafelson and Bert Schneider's newfound success allowed them to get more funding for Raybert Productions and to establish the record company Colgems. Their next project was Head, a feature film starring the Monkees. Co-written with friend Jack Nicholson, and featuring appearances by Nicholson, Victor Mature, Teri Garr, Carol Doda, Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Timothy Carey, Ray Nitschke, Dennis Hopper, it was Rafelson's debut as a director. Rafelson said, "Of course Head is an utterly and totally fragmented film. Among other reasons for making it was that I thought I would never get to make another movie, so I might as well make fifty to start out with and put them all in the same feature." Head is a plotless, stream of consciousness film that, amongst other things, attempts to deconstruct the musical personas of the Monkees and satirize the consumer ideals of "image". In a song sung by the Monkees, they seem to confess by saying: Hey, hey, we are The Monkees/ You know we love to please/ A manufactured image/ With no philosophies. Other scenes utilize psychedelic or surrealistic theatrics such as the Monkees being sucked through a giant vacuum cleaner and turning into specks of dandruff in Victor Mature's head. The film ends with the Monkees being loaded into a truck and driven out of the Columbia Studio gates. The film was a financial failure and the popularity of the Monkees was already in decline,[6] but it later became a cult classic. Raybert's next project, Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper, premiered at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and was released in July 1969, quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon. The film's success gave Raybert enough funds and clout to pursue more ambitious projects. Rafelson and Schneider soon added Schneider's childhood friend Stephen Blauner to their company and its name became BBS Productions (Bert, Bob and Steve). BBS's first project, Five Easy Pieces, was Rafelson's second feature film, shot in 1969. In an interview with Tonguette in Sight & Sound, Rafelson explained the idea behind BBS: "My thought was: there is so much talent here in the US but little talent for recognizing it. I thought together we could do this but that Bert should manage it." New York Times critic Manohla Dargis recently highlighted Rafelson and Schneider for founding "the groovy 1960s company Raybert (later known as BBS Productions) -- and gave us Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show and Hearts and Minds, and lamenting the absence of such risk-taking companies today."[14] Five Easy Pieces was written by Rafelson and Carole Eastman (under the alias Adrien Joyce) and starred Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, and Susan Anspach. Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a gifted classical piano player who works on an oil rig in California and spends most of his time drinking beer and bowling with his put-upon girlfriend Rayette (Black). Bobby is constantly dissatisfied and a non- conformist, stating: "I move around a lot. Not because I'm looking for anything really, but to get away from things that go bad if I stay."[6] Bobby learns from his sister that his father has had a stroke and decides to travel back to his family home in the San Juan Islands in Washington State. He and Rayette go on a road trip to Washington, picking up two hippie hitch-hikers along the way and (in the film's most famous scene) unsuccessfully battle a waitress in a diner for an omelet with wheat toast. Rafelson described Bobby as "a guy who is out of touch with his emotions." The film was a financial hit, earning $18 million, and was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Supporting Actress (Karen Black) and Best Original Screenplay. It also received the New York Film Critics Award for Best Director and for Best Film of 1970.