Bob Rafelson

At 91 years old, Bob Rafelson has this physical status:

Robert 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.

Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), among his best-known films.

With Raybert/BBS Productions partner Bert Schneider, he was also one of the creators of the pop group and television series The Monkees.

Toby Carr Rafelson, the production designer, was his first wife.

Peter Rafelson, who co-wrote Madonna's hit song "Open Your Heart," is his eldest son.

Early life

Robert Jay Rafelson was born in Manhattan on February 21, 1933 to a Jewish family, the son of Marjorie (Blumenfeld) and Sydney Rafelson, a hat ribbon manufacturer. Samson Raphaelson, the screenwriter and playwright who wrote nine films for director Ernst Lubitsch, was his much-older first cousin, who was later fired. "Samson was involved in my work," Rafelson told critic David Thomson. "If he liked a picture, then I was his favorite nephew." But if he didn't like it, I was a distant cousin."

Rafelson attended Trinity-Pawling School, a boarding school in Pawling, New York, from which he graduated in 1950. He'd often left home to pursue an adventurous lifestyle, including riding in a rodeo in Arizona and playing in a jazz band in Acapulco as a child. Rafelson was recruited into the US Army and stationed in Japan after studying philosophy at Dartmouth College (where he had made acquaintances with screenwriter Buck Henry). He worked in Japan as a disk jockey, translated Japanese films, and advised the Shochiku Film Company as to which films would be financially profitable in the United States. "I'd have to watch an Ozu film over and over again," Rafelson said in an interview with writer Peter Tongue: "I'd have to watch an Ozu film over and over again," he said, especially those of Yasujir' Ozu, whose original approach to editing captivated him as a young man: "I'd have to watch an Ozu film over and over again," he said. "I suppose my own aesthetic developed from looking at certain types of images—Bergman and Ozu, and John Ford, if you will."

In high school, Rafelson met Toby Carr, who later married in the mid-1950s. Peter Rafelson, who was born in 1960, and Julie Rafelson, who was born in 1962, were the couple's two children. Toby Rafelson was a production designer on several 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.

Personal life

In 1955, Bob Rafelson married Toby Carr. They lived near Aspen, Colorado, in a house "built in the 1950s by a climber and his 11-year-old son" that Rafelson bought in 1970. "We live here and nowhere else," he said. Julie, Rafelson's 10-year-old daughter, died of burns after a propane stove exploded in the Rafelsons' Aspen home in August 1973. Toby Rafelson was diagnosed with cancer a few weeks after, but he recovered shortly. Although they later divorced, they remained close friends, and Rafelson referred to his first wife as his "head nurse, tutor, brujo." Peter Rafelson, who wrote "Open Your Heart," which became a hit for Madonna, is his eldest son.

In 1999, Rafelson married Gabrielle Taurek; the couple had two sons, E.O. Harper and to George Washington. On July 23, 2022, he died of lung cancer at his Aspen home at the age of 89.

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Early television career

Rafelson's first professional work was as a story editor on the TV show Play of the Week for producer David Susskind in 1959. The series featured televised stage plays from contemporary and classical writers. Rafelson's work required him to read hundreds of plays, choose which were going to be produced, and write some additional dialogue that was uncredited. Rafelson's first writing credits were for an episode of The Witness in 1960 and an episode of the series The Greatest Show on Earth in 1963.

Rafelson and his family migrated to Hollywood in June 1962, where he began working as an associate producer on television shows and films at Universal Pictures, Revue Productions, Desilu Productions, and Screen Gems. He was fired after an argument with Lew Wasserman over creative differences on the show Channing, which culminated in sweeping "awards, medallions, souvenir ashtrays, and other tchotchkes" from Wasserman's desk.

Rafelson met fellow producer Bert Schneider in 1965 while working at Screen Gems. The couple became fast friends and formed Raybert Productions together that year. BBS Productions and film production will later be a Columbia Pictures affiliate. Rafelson and Schneider's first project was a television series about a rock 'n' roll band. Rafelson said the idea for the show, which was inspired by his own misadventures while playing in a Mexican band, predates A Hard Day's Night. "I had planned the show before The Beatles existed," Rafelson said, and it was more focused on having fun than "in earning a living." Raybert Productions sold the idea to Screen Gems, and when they were unable to get either the Dave Clark Five or the Lovin' Spoonful Spoonful for the film, ran advertisements in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for musicians. The Monkees were a band that performed from 1966 to 1968, and the Monkees were among the Monkees.

Despite the fact that the Monkees were a manufactured act, they were immediately successful with audiences, and the youth audience, at the time, was particularly attracted to the Monkees. In 1967, Rafelson and Schneider were named recipients of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series as creators. "The complete show was created in effect in the editing room," Rafelson said. The tempo was of utmost importance...I had to ask one or two of the shows for television to set the tone of how these things should be made." "The first 32 shows were produced by people who had never directed before," Rafelson said, including myself. So the idea of using new directors who were not necessarily keen on traditional ways of thinking was initiated on the series and then moved on to the sequels. "There was a very different way of cutting and doing a half-hour comedy," he said.

Early film career

Rafelson and Bert Schneider's recent success has allowed them to increase funds for Raybert Productions and the establishment of Collegims, the country's largest company. Head, a comedy film starring the Monkees, was their next project. It was Rafelson's first film director, co-written with friend Jack Nicholson, Victor Mature, Teri Garr, Carol Doda, Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Timothy Carey, Ray Nitschke, and Dennis Hopper. "Of course Head is a utterly and totally fragmented film," Rafelson said. Among other reasons for making it was that I felt I would never get to make another film, so I might as well make fifty to start out with and put them all together in a single film.

Head was the first of many Rafelson-Nicholson collaborations, which included Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, among other things. "I may have thought I started his career, but I suspect he started my career," Nicholson wrote in a Esquire magazine profile.

Head is a plotless, stream of consciousness film that, among other things, aims to deconstruct the Monkees' musical personas and ridicule the Monkees' "image" aims. They sound to admit by saying: Hey, We are the Monkees/ You know we love to please/ A manufactured image/ With no philosophies. In Victor Mature's head, some scenes use psychedelic or surrealistic theatrics, such as the Monkees being sucked into specks of dandruff. The Monkees are loaded into a truck and driven out of Columbia Studio gates at the end of the film. The film was a financial loss and the Monkees' fame was already in decline, but it has since emerged as a cult classic with a large following.

Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper, premiered at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and was released in July 1969, quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon. Raybert was able to invest in more ambitious ventures thanks to the film's success. Schneider's childhood friend Stephen Blauner was hired by Rafelson and Schneider shortly, and the company's name was changed to BBS Productions (Bert, Bob, and Steve). Five Easy Pieces, BBS' first film, was shot in 1969. Rafelson discussed BBS' theory in a Sight & Sound interview: "There's so much talent here in the United States, but there is no talent for recognizing it." We thought we could do this together, but Bert should handle it."

"the groovy 1960s business Raybert (later known as BBS Productions) was founded by Rafelson and Schneider, who later became known as BBS Productions) — and showed us Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show and Hearts and Minds, and mourning the absence of such risk-taking companies today."

Five Easy Pieces was written by Rafelson and Carole Eastman (under the alias Adrien Joyce) and starred Nicholson, Karen Black, and Susan Anspach. Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a talented classical piano player who works on a California oil rig and spends the majority of his time drinking beer and bowling with his put-upon girlfriend Rayette (Black). Bobby is constantly dissatisfied and a non-conformist, saying: "I go about a lot." Not because I'm looking for something specific, but rather to get away from things that go wrong if I stay." Bobby learns from his brother that his father suffered from a stroke and returns to visit his family's home in Washington state's San Juan Islands. Bobby and Rayette embark on a road trip to Washington, picking up two hippie hitch-hikers along the way, and in the film's most memorable feature, Bobby unsuccessfully competes with a waitress in a diner for an omelet with wheat toast. Bobby's arm is cleared of the table in a tense manner.

"Do you see this sign!?"

He blurts. Well, it's definitive of Brando's close to precise action in A Streetcar named Desire, but Bobby may have been channeling someone's behavior that he hadn't seen in the films. (To discredit Rafelson's suggested plagiarism, a cinematic debriefing occurs in 1996 in Blood and Wine, where Nicholson and Michael Caine, together with Nicholson, seek a clear table for them both in a cafeteria, enhances the situation by taking a tray with used utensils from one table and dropping it to the ground in nonchalant simplicity.) Bobby has been described as "a guy who is out of touch with his emotions" by Rafelson.

The film was a financial hit, grossing $18 million at the box office, and had been nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Supporting Actress (Black) and Best Original Screenplay. Rafelson, a film producer and co-writer, was nominated for two Oscars. It has also been nominated for Best Director and Best Film of 1970 by the New York Film Critics Award. Rafelson was dubbed "a new filmmaker who uses film with the subtlety of a novelist, but without losing any of the cinema's unique combination of image and sound."

"The film is joyfully alive to the road life of its hero," filmmaker Roger Ebert called Five Easy Pieces "a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity" in his original 1970 study in the Chicago Sun-Times. .. . . Robert Eroica Dupea is one of American cinema's most memorable characters. And, Ebert's "Great Movies" essay on the film explored the consequences of seeing it for the first time: "We'd had a revelation." This was the way American movies should go: into idiosyncratic characters, into a dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, and then a plot free to surprise us about the characters that did not have to be happy. In his "Great Movies" collection, Ebert later included Five Easy Pieces.

The King of Marvin Gardens was Rafelson's next film, which was released on BBS in 1972. Jacob Brackman, a writer based on a Rafelson and Brackman tale, directed Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson, Scatman Crothers, and Charles Lavine. The title refers to the original Monopoly game board in Atlantic City, where the misspelled and misplaced "Marvin Gardens" was one of the Yellow squares in the children's game of capitalistic triumph.

Nicholson plays David Staebler, a melancholy Philadelphia disk jockey who shares a long, angst-ridden tale of his youth with his elderly Grandfather (Lavine). David is contacted by his extroverted con artist brother Jason (Dern), who has pleaded for his release from prison in Atlantic City. As David arrives, he becomes involved in Jason's plan to turn a South Pacific island into a gambling casino in order to "full their childhood desire of having an island kingdom of their own." To make the fantasy come true, David joins Jason, his sister Sally (Burstyn), and Sally's stepdaughter Jessica (Robinson). However, David soon learns Jason is in over his head and owes money to a real gangster named Lewis (Crothers), who is not amused by Jason's ingenuity.

Although critics have since re-evaluated the King of Marvin Gardens, mixed reviews indicated that it was not a financial success, it was not a financial success. Despite being the BBS' next-to-last film, David Thomson said it "may be even better film" than Five Easy Pieces. "I wanted to make my own pictures," Rafelson told Thomson. Bert was also on the march towards radical politics. "He wanted to do Hearts and Minds [the 1974 film about the Vietnam war]" Hearts and Minds (directed by Rafelson's colleague, Peter Davis) received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, and it was the last film to carry the BBS imprimatur.

Rafelson then spent more than a year on a film that would never be made about the slave trade in Africa. He rode over five thousand miles in West Africa, and has said he "lived the lives of many of the characters that I'd read about." "wanted to change to something more cheerful, to project a more exciting facet of myself," Rafelson says. Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Scatman Crothers were the next film to remain Hungry, based on Charles Gaines' book and adapted by Rafelson and Gaines.

Craig Blake, a millionaire in Alabama who has recently inherited his parents' fortune after their tragic deaths in a plane crash. He leads a solitary life in his mansion, with only his butler (Crothers) to keep him company as he idles away his days. When he becomes involved in a shady investment company, he visits the Olympic Spa gym, where bodybuilders are preparing for the forthcoming Mr. Universe competition. Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger), who teaches him that "You can't grow without burning," he befriends bodybuilder Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger). I don't like to be too cosy. It's impossible to give up once you get used to it. "I like to stay hungry." Mary Tate, the gym's receptionist, is also dating, but his upper-class friends are still don't approve of his new lower-class colleagues. In the end, Blake selects his new friends and buys the Santo gym. The film earned Rafelson and Gaines a prize for Best Comedy Adapted From Another Medium from the Writers Guild of America, while Schwarzenegger received a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture.

Rafelson began production on the film Brubaker in 1978, starring Robert Redford, Yaphet Kotto, Jane Alexander, and Morgan Freeman. To look at the film, he had spent several days in a top security detention facility. After only ten days of shooting, Rafelson was shot from the camera. "It's the time when I reportedly 'punched someone out,'" Rafelson said. "He was the founder of the company, and there was a lot of talk about it, but it was grossly exaggerated." Stuart Rosenberg replaced him. Rafelson filed a breach-of-contract and slander lawsuit in May 1979, claiming that 20th Century Fox had promised him complete autonomy and creative control, but had made claims that he was incompetent, emotionally fragile, and unqualified to lead a major motion picture.

Later film career

In 1981, Rafelson teamed up with Jack Nicholson, directing him in their fourth collaboration, The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on James M. Cain's book The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had been released as a film in 1946 with John Garfield and Lana Turner. David Mamet — the first screenplay by the playwright — directed the remake, and Jessica Lange co-starred Jessica Lange. Nicholson plays a Depression-era drifter who stumbles on a rural diner and becomes embroiled with the owner's wife in a plot to murder her husband. "The critics in America," Rafelson said of the film's reception, "They've changed – at least when it first appeared out – don't like it much," said the film's director, but in France, Germany, and Russia, and some of the countries that I have visited since the film's release, "it seems to have emerged as one of the movies that people love the most because of its unexpected romanticity." He is regarded as a auteur in France, in particular.

Rafelson directed Black Widow, starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell and Ronald Bass, and was directed by Ronald Bass in 1987. "The joys of a film well made, the production design of Gene Callahan, and a stellar cast also featured Dennis Hopper, Nicol Williamson, and Diane Ladd." Rafelson's next project was Mountains of the Moon (1990), a film about Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke's journey to central Africa in 1857–58, which culminated in Speke's discovery of the source of the Nile River. Patrick Bergin appeared in Burton and Iain Glen as Speke, and Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert praised it as "completely absorbent." "It tells its tale soberly and thoughtfully, in a nonchalant tone," Ebert continued. It's the sort of film that brings you right out of the screen and into the know more about this man Burton. "The exploits of Sir Richard Francis Burton make Lawrence of Arabia seem like a tourist," critic Jack Kroll wrote in Newsweek. www.google.com . . This film grips you from scene to scene, from Africa and England to the Royal Geographic Society's nabobs, ranging from mild to deadly in both 'primitive' and 'civilized' cultures: from the African tribal chiefs, mild or murderous to the Royal Geographic Society's nabobs. "I was very lucky to be able to make this film," Rafelson later said. And I can tell you that there was never a film that I loved making, it was this one."

Rafelson teamed up with Nicholson in 1992 for their fifth collaboration, and Carole Eastman, a Five Easy Pieces screenwriter, was joined by the film Man Trouble. With Nicholson, Blood, and Wine, he made his sixth and final appearance in 1996. Poodle Springs, 1998, and 2002's No Good Deed, based on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett's work, respectively. The 24th Moscow International Film Festival was open to No Good Deed. For almost 30 years, Rafelson and Nicholson worked on film projects.

Rafelson has appeared at numerous international film festivals, including in Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Greece, Japan, Serbia, and Turkey, and Turkey, and has given several masterclasses. He has contributed commentaries or interviews to Head, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine. In addition, Rafelson has contributed to the Los Angeles Times Magazine and John Brockman's collection The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years.

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