By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

Still Alice Co-Director Richard Glatzer Was 63

Posted Wednesday, March 11th, 2015 - Comments Off on Still Alice Co-Director Richard Glatzer Was 63
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Richard Glatzer, 63, passed away Tuesday, March 10 in Los Angeles after a four-year battle with ALS. His most recent film, Still Alice, co-directed with his husband Wash Westmoreland, mushroomed into a global box=office success after its lead actress, Julianne Moore was awarded an Oscar for her performance in the titular role in the 2014 Academy Awards.

Born in Flushing Queens, on January 28, 1952, Glatzer grew up in Long Island and New Jersey, his avid interest in cinema dates back to his early childhood.

A natural student, he received an undergraduate degree in English from An Arbor Michigan then went on to earn a PhD in English from The University of Virginia.  He also took charge of the UVA film program and formed a friendship with director Frank Capra that was instrumental in a mid-1970s revival of interest in the Hollywood legend’s work.

In the early 1980s, Glatzer gave up academia and entered  the world of  film, working under the tutelage of Jay Presson Allen and Lewis Allen (Crime of Miss Jean Brodie, Cabaret). He then moved to the West Coast and started working on the daytime TV show  Divorce Court.< A committed HIV/AIDS activist, he organized many fundraisers in Los Angeles in the early nineties as well as running a famed underground club Sit-and-Spin.  Many of the performers from his club took part in his first independent film Grief in 1993 which drew on his background on Divorce Court as well his own experiences dealing with the loss of his partner of seven years to AIDS, Donald Ray Berry.

He met Wash Westmoreland in 1995, after which they became life partners and together made four films as co-writers and directors, The Fluffer (2001), Quinceañera (2006) which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, The Last of Robin Hood (2013) and Still Alice (2014).  Of working with him, Julianne Moore said…..

He also worked on several hit reality TV shows including Road Rules, The Osbournes and America’s Next Top Model.

Richard was first and foremost a lover of film. Even after his ALS diagnosis in 2011, he felt compelled to continue his work as a filmmaker and story-teller. Many of his own experience in dealing with disease informed the adaptation of Still Alice from the best-selling novel by Lisa Genova. On set, he inspired the cast and crew with his perseverance, co -directed the film by typing with one finger into a text-to-speech app on his iPad.< He is survived by his husband Wash Westmoreland, his sister Joan Kodner and her husband David, his loving nieces and nephews, and his daughter Ruby Smith.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon