This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 1, 2010 - George Hickenlooper, a St. Louis-born filmmaker, was found dead in Denver Saturday morning. Oct. 30. He apparently suffered a heart attack. Hickenlooper was 47 years old, and was in Denver for a festival premiere of "Casino Jack," a new feature about disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and to help his cousin campaign for governor.
"Casino Jack," will open the 19th annual Stella Artois St. Louis International Film Festival on Thursday, Nov. 11.
Kevin Spacey, who stars in "Casino Jack," said, "I can't believe he's gone because George was so alive, bubbling with energy, drive, commitment, an open heart and a brilliant sense of humor. He was one of a kind."
John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver and George Hickenlooper's cousin, said "his passion for life, zeal for people and unquenchable curiosity enriched everyone who had the fortune to know him."
"Hollywood is a brutal, brutal place," George Hickenlooper said on one of his frequent visits to his hometown. We spoke after a showing of two of his films at the St. Louis Art Museum. "Cutthroat," he added. "The epitome of social Darwinism. It's like you're a little mouse and you might get devoured, and not even by a lion. By a weasel."
Throughout his busy career, Hickenlooper continued to reject the values of Hollywood and fight what he saw as its corrupting influence. He made a lot of powerful people mad, and yet his talent was such that he always had work. Beginning in 1988 with a television documentary about Hollywood rebel Dennis Hopper - "Art, Acting and the Suicide Chair" - Hickenlooper created more than a dozen feature-length narrative films and documentaries, movies that more often than not asked knotty moral questions and ended in irresolution.
Some of his movies were quite good, and one of them starred one of the most famous men in the world, Mick Jagger, but fame eluded Hickenlooper, except perhaps in his hometown of St. Louis. But Hickenlooper's latest movie, "Casino Jack," starring the eminently bankable Kevin Spacey as a well-known and controversial public figure, is already attracting the kind of buzz that might presage at least a modicum of box-office success.
The son of a college professor/playwright, Hickenlooper began exposing movie film to light when he was a student at St. Louis University High School. After graduating from Yale, he headed for Hollywood. He broke into the movie business in the late 1980s with legendary low-budget exploitation director Roger Corman, who had provided a leg-up to people Hickenlooper admired, movie icons of the 1970s like Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola.
Hickenlooper's first real breakthrough came with "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse." Working with Fax Bahr, Hickenlooper assembled footage shot by Eleanor Coppola during her husband's disaster-plagued filming of the Vietnam war movie "Apocalypse Now." The footage was intercut with recent interviews with the stars, including Martin Sheen, who suffered a heart attack in the midst of the intense and wearying shoot. The documentary, which won several awards, was a major hit with critics. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post declared it "the most engrossing, most revealing film about the making of a movie ever produced."
Besides about eight documentaries of varying length, Hickenlooper made half a dozen feature films, notably:
"Factory Girl" (2006), starring young Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, the self-destructive socialite who became one of artist Andy Warhol's so-called "Superstars,";
"The Man from Elysian Fields" (2001), with Andy Garcia as a failed writer who reluctantly becomes a paid male escort and Jagger as an aging roue;
"The Low Life" (1995), a semi-autobiographical drama about bright young men down and out in Hollywood.
" 'The Man from Elysian Fields" has a lot to recommend it," said Cliff Froehlich, director of the St. Louis film festival. "Jagger's performance is extraordinary. 'Factory Girl' was an interesting film, as was 'The Low Life,' but I think the two films closest to his vision were two documentaries: 'Hearts of Darkness,' which looks at the creative process and the way it can be both energizing and maddening, and 'Mayor of the Sunset Strip,' in which he explores the nature of celebrity."
"Mayor of the Sunset Strip" is the 2006 profile of longtime Los Angeles radio personality Rodney Bingenheimer. Stephen Holden in the New York Times praised the movie, which he described as a 'wistful, soft-edged portrait of an elfin, vacant-eyed waif who presided for more than two decades as a social impresario of the Los Angeles rock scene'"
I spent some time with Hickenlooper on his visits to St. Louis and found him to be warm and enthusiastic and generally forthcoming, but quick to anger when discussing his dealings with the mainstream movie business. There often seemed to be controversies surrounding his movies - for example, his production of "Casino Jack" became embroiled in a complicated lawsuit with another filmmaker over use of the title.
Cliff Froehlich, as a longtime film critic for the Riverfront Times and more recently as director of the St. Louis film festival, got to know Hickenlooper and his work well. Froehlich said:
"George had two sides. He could be quite generous, but he also spoke his mind when he wanted to. And he also got prickly when criticism of his work was involved. He was very protective of his work."
The most notorious controversy involving George Hickenlooper had to do with his relationship with actor-director Billy Bob Thornton. In the early 1990s, both men were just getting started in Hollywood. Thornton used to perform a dramatic monologue in the voice of a mentally deficient man reminiscent of Lenny in "Of Mice and Men." As the monologue went along, it slowly became clear that the man had used an agricultural tool to kill his mother and her abusive boyfriend, almost without thinking about it.
George Hickenlooper filmed the monologue and made a stunning short film out of it, with some dramatic action added. The short called "Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade." Then Hickenlooper and Thornton had a falling out - perhaps it was over the editing of the short film, perhaps it was because Hickenlooper refused to cast Thornton in a feature he was working on. In any event, in 1996 "Sling Blade," with the monologue now a small if powerful part of a full dramatic feature, was released in 1996, written and directed by Thornton.
"Sling Blade" was a critical and box-office hit and Thornton won the best adapted screenplay Oscar and went on to become a medium-level star. Hickenlooper felt ripped off, particularly when Thornton did not thank him in his Oscar acceptance speech.
"Looking at it objectively," said Froehlich, "it was Billy Bob's material, it was his work, he had the right to direct it. But George was denied a real opportunity. Directing 'Sling Blade,' or being more closely associated with it, would have probably opened the door to more success. He was very angry."
"As for some of his other film-world arguments, George was stubborn in the sense that he was unwilling to compromise his visions. I suspect that over time he had any number of chances to make more commercial films, chances that he turned down. Of course, he wanted his work to be successful, to have an audience, but he also wanted it to qualify as art. One good side to his stubbornness was it meant that he kept pushing forward where a lot of filmmaker would have given up. George kept working."
Hickenlooper, who was born in St. Louis May 25, 1963, never lost his love for the cinema of the 1970s, the movies of Coppola and Scorsese and Nicholson he saw when he was growing up. Froehlich said, "Those movies continued to be his main source of inspiration, movies with ambiguous endings, movies that were unafraid to challenge viewers, to add to their discomfort. This made for great cinema but not necessarily for box-office success."
Hickenlooper's movies were regularly featured at the St. Louis film festival, and he was given awards by the festival and treated like a star. One of his movies, "Dogtown," is based on the semi-autobiographical premise of an actor who gets the celebrity treatment in his hometown despite a relative lack of success in Hollywood.
"George very much liked the fact that we in St. Louis were appreciative of his work, and made him somewhat of a celebrity here," said Froehlich. "George was a typical artist, he wanted his work to be seen and loved. And St. Louis gave him plenty of that. The festival played virtually all of his work, I and my predecessors paid a lot of attention to George, and deservedly so. And George really appreciated this attention. He felt welcome here."
Froehlich said that a tribute to Hickenlooper and his work would open the film festival at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 11 at the Tivoli. The opening-night cocktail party will be cancelled. "Casino Jack" will be shown at 8 p.m., as scheduled.
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, has also been a long-time reviewer of movies.