Biography

Collapsed after playing in a celebrity basketball game for the NBA Entertainment League and died a few hours later at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica.

Nephew of Jonathan Demme

The original ending of The Ref (1994) had Denis Leary being caught by the cops to show the son that a life of crime leads nowhere. However, after screening the movie to a test audience and receiving negative comments about the ending, Ted changed it. He later admitted he regretted the change.

Started his career from the bottom rung, working as a production assistant at MTV before going on to create Yo! MTV Raps (1988) and directing other spots, including the cable network's infamous famous black-and-white rants starring then-unknown cigarette-sucking funny guy Denis Leary.

Musician Greg Dulli, who appears with his band, The Afghan Whigs, in Demme's film, Beautiful Girls (1996), was so distraught when he heard of his death that he scrapped a nearly completed album for his band, The Twilight Singers, and wrote an entirely new set of songs.

And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used.

I felt that as long as we were being honest, and that we didn't bend the truth to accomplish another goal, to be entertaining or to be a happy ending, I was confident that we'd be able to tell the story the way it happened.

I was influenced by European movies, old Fellini, old Kurosawa - any sort of foreign film.

But my humble opinion is, I'm not quite sure where I stand on the legalization of drugs - though, if tequila is legal, pot should probably be legal.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.