George Hickenlooper(1963-2010)
- Director
- Writer
- Producer
George Hickenlooper graduated from Yale University in 1986. He was born
on May 25, 1963 in St. Louis, Missouri and raised there, Boston, and
San Francisco. His interest in film began in childhood and stemmed from
his great-uncle's (Leopold Stokowski)
involvement in the movie
Fantasia (1940). Hickenlooper's interest
also bloomed from his father being a playwright and his mother starting
a guerrilla theater troop, which would protest the Vietnam War. Both of
his parents told him the techniques of story telling whether to make an
aesthetic or political point. Hickenlooper's first short Super 8mm
films were animated and made with this grammar school friend
Kirk Wise who, years later, would go on to
direct
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
for Walt Disney. While attending a Jesuit
high school, Hickenlooper turned to live action short filmmaking. Many
of those shorts ("Telefission", "A Day in the Life", "A Black and White
Film" and "The Revenant") were premiered on Public Television in St.
Louis and Kansas City. Hickenlooper spent one summer studying at the
USC School of Cinema and Television, and then went on to Yale for a
B.A. in History and Film Studies. After graduating, Hickenlooper
interned for producer Roger Corman and, in
1991, authored the book "Reel Conversations" (Citadel Press), a
collection of interviews with film directors and critics. Hickenlooper
made his professional directing debut with
Art, Acting, and the Suicide Chair: Dennis Hopper (1988),
a short documentary about Dennis Hopper.
However, he made his breakthrough when he premiered
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991),
the internationally acclaimed documentary about the making of
Apocalypse Now (1979), at the
Cannes Film Festival.
