John Carpenter

At 76 years old, John Carpenter physical status not available right now. We will update John Carpenter's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American filmmaker, screenwriter and composer.

Although Carpenter has worked with various movie genres, he is associated most commonly with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s.Most films of Carpenter's career were initially commercial and critical failures, with the notable exceptions of Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Starman (1984).

However, many of Carpenter's films from the 1970s and the 1980s have come to be considered as cult classics, and he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker.

The cult classics that Carpenter has directed include Dark Star (1974), Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988), and In the Mouth of Madness (1995).

He returned to the Halloween franchise as both composer and executive producer for the horror sequel Halloween (2018). Carpenter composed or co-composed most of his films' music.

He won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the film Vampires (1998).

Carpenter has released three studio albums, titled Lost Themes (2015), Lost Themes II (2016), and Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998 (2017).

Early life

Carpenter was born on January 16, 1948, in Carthage, New York, the son of Milton Jean (née Carter) and Howard Ralph Carpenter, a music professor. He and his family relocated to Bowling Green, Kentucky, during 1953. He was interested in films from an early age, particularly the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as 1950s low-budget horror films such as The Thing from Another World and high-budget science fiction like Forbidden Planet, and began filming horror short films with 8 mm film even before starting high school. He attended Western Kentucky University, where his father chaired the music department, then transferred to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts during 1968, but quit to make his first feature film.

Personal life

Carpenter met his future wife, actress Adrienne Barbeau, on the set of his 1978 television film Someone's Watching Me!. They married on January 1, 1979, and divorced in 1984. During this time, she starred in The Fog and appeared in Escape from New York. They have one son, John Cody Carpenter (born May 7, 1984).

Carpenter has been married to producer Sandy King since 1990. She produced his films In the Mouth of Madness, Village of the Damned, Vampires, and Ghosts of Mars. She was earlier the script supervisor for Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live. Of the latter, she was also associate producer. She co-created the comic book series Asylum, with which Carpenter is involved.

In an episode of Animal Planet's Animal Icons titled "It Came from Japan", he discusses his admiration for the original Godzilla film.

Carpenter appreciates video games as art and particularly likes the Sonic the Hedgehog and F.E.A.R. franchises. He offered to speak for and help direct the cinematics for F.E.A.R. 3. He has also expressed an interest in making a film based on Dead Space.

Carpenter holds a commercial pilot's license, flying rotorcraft-helicopters. He has included helicopters in his films, many times doing a cameo as a pilot.

Source

Career

Carpenter wrote and directed an 8-minute short film, Captain Voyeur, as part of a beginning film course at USC Cinema in 1969. The film was discovered in the USC archives in 2011 and was fascinating because it revealed elements that would appear in his sequel film, Halloween (1978).

For The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), which received an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, he worked with writer John Longenecker as co-writer, film editor, and music composer. The short film was expanded to 35 mm, sixty prints were made, and Universal Studios produced the film theatrically in the United States and Canada for two years.

Dark Star (1974), Carpenter's first big film as director, was a science-fiction tale co-written with Dan O'Bannon (who later went on to write Alien, borrowing heavily from much of Dark Star). According to reports, the film was only $60,000 and was difficult to make, with Carpenter doing the musical score, producing, and directing, while O'Bannon being involved in the film and doing the special effects, which attracted George Lucas' attention. Carpenter was praised for his ability to produce low-budget films.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Carpenter's next film, was a low-budget thriller influenced by Howard Hawks' films, particularly Rio Bravo. Carpenter, a Dark Star, was responsible for several aspects of the film's development. He not only wrote, directed, and produced the film, but also edited it with the pseudonym "John T. Chance" (the name of John Wayne's character in Rio Bravo). Carpenter has said that Assault on Precinct 13 is his first real film since it was the first film that he shot on a schedule. Carpenter's first film collaboration with Debra Hill, who would work with Carpenter on some of his most well-known projects.

Carpenter assembles a core cast made up of veteran but relatively unknown actors. Austin Stoker, who had appeared in science fiction, explosion, and blaxploitation films before, and Darwin Joston, who had been mostly for television and had briefly been Carpenter's next-door neighbor.

In the United States, where the film is now widely regarded as one of the finest exploitation films of the 1970s, it received a critical reassessment.

Someone's Watching Me! Carpenter and Carpenter both wrote and directed the Lauren Hutton thriller Someone's Watching Me! This television film is the story of a single, working woman who discovers that she is being stalked right after arriving in Los Angeles.

Eyes of Laura Mars, a 1978 thriller starring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Irvin Kershner, was adapted by Carpenter from a spec script titled Eyes, which would be Carpenter's first big studio film of his career.

Halloween (1978) was a commercial success and was instrumental in the emergence of the slasher genre. Carpenter took the idea and another Yablans suggestion that it be made during Halloween and woven a tale, starting with a producer named The Babysitter Murders, who feared a film about babysitters being threatened by a stalker. "Halloween night," Carpenter said of the basic idea: "Halloween night." It has never been the subject of a film. My plan was to film an old haunted house video.

In an interview published in 2005, film director Bob Clark suggested that Carpenter had requested a sequel to his 1974 film Black Christmas (written by Roy Moore) that featured an unseen and motiveless killer murdering students in a university sorority house. Carpenter questioned Clark about his thoughts on creating the anonymous slasher in Black Christmas, as well as in the 2009 documentary Clarkworld (written and directed by Clark's former production designer Deren Abram following Clark's tragic death in 2007).

Carpenter and Debra Hill wrote the film, with Carpenter admitting that the music was inspired by both Dario Argento's Suspiria (which also inspired the film's modest color scheme) and William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

Carpenter once more worked on a very modest budget, $300,000. The film earned more than $65 million at launch, making it one of the most well-received independent films of all time.

"Reality crass exploitation," Carpenter says of Halloween. At a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you, I decided to make a film I would like to have seen as a child. Carpenter has argued that the film has been cited as an allegory on account of sexual integrity and casual sex, though Carpenter has clarified that this was not his intention: "It has been suggested that I was making some sort of moral argument." I'm not sure I'm not. I viewed the characters as "obvious teenagers" in Halloween.

Carpenter's self-composed "Halloween Theme" became recognizable apart from the film, contributing to the film's critical and commercial success.

Carpenter began what was supposed to be the first of many collaborations with actor Kurt Russell as he directed Elvis's television film.

Carpenter boosted Halloween's success with The Fog (1980), a horror story co-written by Hill and based on horror films such as Tales from the Crypt and The Crawling Eye, a 1958 film about monsters hiding in clouds.

Carpenter's completion of the Fog was an unusually difficult process. He was dissatisfied with the result after seeing a rough cut of the film. For the first time in his filmmaking career, he had to find a way to salvage a nearly finished film that didn't meet his high hopes. Carpenter shot an additional video that included a number of new scenes in order to make the film more cohesive and scary.

Despite production issues and mostly critical feedback, the Fog was Carpenter's second commercial success. The film was made on a $1,000,000 budget, but it grossed over $21,000,000 in the United States alone. Carpenter has stated that The Fog is not his favorite film, but that it is not a "minor horror classic."

Carpenter immediately followed The Fog (1981) with the science-fiction story Escape from New York (1981). With a 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, Carpenter had collaborated with (Kurt Russell, Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, and Frank Doubleday), or would continue to work with again (Harry Dean Stanton), as well as several well-known actors (Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine), it became both commercially lucrative (more than $130 million) and critically acclaimed (with an 85% on Rotten Tomatoe

Russell and respected character actors, such as Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Keith David, and Richard Masur's next film, The Thing (1982), is notable for its high production values, including innovative special effects by Rob Bottin, special visual effects by matte artist Albert Whitlock, and a score by Ennio Morricone. Universal Pictures bought the Thing. Although Carpenter's film used the same source material as 1951 Howard Hawks' film The Thing from Another World, it is more faithful to the John W. Campbell, Jr. novella, which was based on the John W. Campbell, Jr. novella. Moreover, The Thing was also included in Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" series (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness) that had bleak endings for the film's characters, unlike the Hawks film.

The Thing, a violent, sinister horror film, did not appeal to audiences in 1982's summer. Cultural historians and writers have been trying to figure out why The Thing's initial inability to connect with audiences has been a long line since its appearance. Carpenter said in a 1999 interview, viewers skepticism against The Thing for its nihilistic, depressing view at a time when the United States was in the midst of a recession. It was first launched against the E.T.'s most competitive and profit-driven competitor. The Extra-Terrestrial ($619 million), a family-friendly film that came two weeks earlier, was released a more optimistic view of alien visitation.

Carpenter's immediate impact was immediate: he lost the job of directing Firestarter, a 1984 science fiction horror film, due to The Thing's poor showing. His previous work had earned him a multi-film contract at Universal, but the studio decided to hire him out of it rather than him. He continued filmmaking afterward but lost confidence, and did not decide not to discuss The Thing's demise until 1985, where he said, "I was branded "a pornographer of violence." I had no idea it would be handled in this way. The Thing was just too heavy for the time. I knew it would be good, but I didn't think it would be too heavy. "I didn't take the public's taste into account" when I said "Nothing about the public's taste."

Although The Thing was not immediately popular, it was able to gain new viewers and admiration on home video and later on television.

Critics and followers have reevaluated The Thing as a landmark of the horror genre in the years since its debut. The Thing is "a black, memorable film [that] may not be considered a masterpiece" in a priorization by Peter Nicholls in 1992. It has been dubbed one of Carpenter's finest films. "Carpenter's most important and underrated directorial effort," John Kenneth Muir said, and critic Matt Zoller Seitz said, "is one of the finest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made."

Trace Thurman dubbed it one of the finest films ever made, and Empire magazine selected it as one of the 500 Greatest Movies of All Time in 2008, naming it "a relentless sequence of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess, and outright, nihilistic terror." It's now considered to be one of the best horror films ever produced and a classic of the genre.

Christine, Carpenter's next film, was an 1983 version of the Stephen King novel of the same name. The tale revolves around Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), a high-school geek who buys a junked 1958 Plymouth Fury with supernatural abilities. As Cunningham restores and reconstructs the car, he becomes dangerously attached to it. On its arrival, Christine ran a successful business and was well-received by critics. He said he directed it because it was the only thing available to him at the time.

The script by Michael Douglas, produced by Michael Douglas, was well received by Columbia Pictures, which preferred it over the script for E.T. Steven Spielberg was inspired to go to Universal Pictures by Steven Spielberg, who was inspired. Douglas selected Carpenter to be the director due to his reputation as an action director who could also convey a lot of emotion. The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Los Angeles Weekly praised the star's description as a romantic comedy based on It Happened One Night but without a space alien. Jeff Bridges' portrayal of Starman received Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for his film, as well as a Golden Globe award for Jack Nitzsche for Best Musical Score.

Carpenter was given the opportunity to direct the newest Alexander–Ilya Salkind fantasy epic Santa Claus after seeing a video of Starman, the executive producer of the Superman film franchise. During lunch at The Ritz, Salkind made the request to Carpenter, and although he loved the prospect of departing from his normal habits and directing a children's fantasy film, he wanted 24 hours to consider the possibility. If he directs the film, he'd made a list of things; they included: 100% creative control, the right to assume scriptwriting duties, the casting of Brian Dennehy as Santa Claus, and a $5 million signing fee (the same amount that film's actor Dudley Moore was receiving). Salkind turned down his bid for the command.

Carpenter continued to fail after the financial failure of his big-budget action–comedy Big Trouble in Little China (1986) – had to be financed. He revived making lower budget films, such as Prince of Darkness (1987), a film influenced by BBC's film Quatermass. Although some of the films from this period, such as They Live (1988), attracted a cult following, he never fully understood mass-market potential.

Carpenter's 1990s work includes Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and Village of the Damned (1995). Body Bags, a television horror anthology film made in collaboration with Tobe Hooper, was not well received by audiences or critics, but there has been a cult following since then and Vampires (1998), which featured James Woods as the leader of a group of vampire hunters in Catholic affiliations.

Carpenter produced the soundtrack for Sentinel Returns (titled "Earth/Air") in 1998, which was released for PC and PlayStation.

Ghosts of Mars was released in 2001 and was also unsuccessful. Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog were remakes in 2005, the former being produced by Carpenter himself, but in an interview, he said, "I come in and say hello to everybody." "Go home."

Carpenter was a producer for an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror television series as one of the first thirteen filmmakers to appear in the first season. Critics and admiration for Carpenter's fans generally agreed with his episode, "Cigarette Burns." He produced another original episode for the show's second season, "Pro-Life," about a teenage girl who is assaulted and impregnated by a demon and wants an abortion, but her attempts are stymied by her religious, gun-toting father and her three brothers.

The Ward, Carpenter's first film since Ghosts of Mars, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2010 before a limited release in the United States in July 2011. It received generally critical feedback from critics and only made $5.3 million in comparison to an estimated $10 million budget. It's his most recent directorial venture as of 2022.

F.E.A.R. Carpenter narrated the video game F.E.A.R. While still researching the storyline, the 3rd is also advising on it. Carpenter received the Lifetime Award from the Freak Show Horror Film Festival on October 10, 2010.

The indie label Sacred Bones Records released his album Lost Themes on February 3, 2015. Carpenter will appear in London and Manchester, England, on October 19, 2015. All Tomorrow's Parties announced on October 19, 2015, that he would be performing old and new compositions. Lost Themes II, Carpenter's sequel to Lost Themes, was announced in February 2016 and was released on April 15th this year. Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1988, he's released his third studio album titled Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998, which was released on October 20, 2017.

On the eleventh entry in the Halloween film series, simply named Halloween, Carpenter returned as executive producer, co-composer, and creative consultant. The film is a direct sequel to Carpenter's original film, forgetting the continuity of all other subsequent films. It was his first direct involvement with the franchise since 1982's Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Carpenter also served as a composer and executive producer on the 2021 sequel to Halloween Kills and the 2022 sequel, Halloween Ends.

Source