Richard Rush (director)

:"For the United States statesman, see Richard Rush"

Richard Rush (born April 15, 1929) is an American movie director, best known for the Oscar-nominated "The Stunt Man". His other works, however, have been less celebrated. The next best-known of his movies is "Color of Night", also nominated, but in this case for the Golden Raspberry Award. He also directed "Freebie and The Bean", an over-the-top police buddy comedy/drama starring Alan Arkin and James Caan. He co-wrote the screenplay for the movie "Air America".

Rush was born in New York City in 1930, and spent his childhood fascinated by Marcel Proust and "Batman" comics.Fact|date=September 2008 He was one of the first students of UCLA’s film program,and, after graduation, Rush worked to create television programs for the United States military showcasing the nation’s involvement in the Korean War. While he agreed with the military’s involvement in the region, Rush’s participation in this largely symbolic conflict can be seen as a defining event for the director who later explained "There’s a recurring theme that I keep getting attracted to in film…Being unable to accept truth, we have a tendency to accept systems, and to believe in a series of learned homilies and arbitrary rituals of good and evil, right and wrong. Magic, king, country, mother, God, all those burning truths we got from our early bathroom training from bumper stickers and from crocheted pillow cases. When it’s right to kill. When it’s not right to kill. Under what circumstances. Arbitrary rules invented for the occasion. And we really dedicate ourselves to them ferociously. And they tend to obscure any real human feeling or any real morality that might emerge to substitute for it."

After his propaganda work, Rush opened a production company to produce commercials and industrial films. At the age of thirty, Rush sold this business to finance his first feature "Too Soon To Love" (1959), inspired by the neo-realism of François Truffaut’s "The 400 Blows", which he produced on a shoestring budget of $50,000 and sold to Universal Pictures for distribution. "Too Soon to Love" marks the second film appearance of Jack Nicholson (who stars in two later Rush films).

Rush directed three films for AIP in the late 1960s exploring counter-cultures of the period and also introducing the rack focus, a technique Rush claims to have discovered and named. Rush's first studio effort was "Getting Straight" in 1970. Ingmar Bergman called this the “best American film of the decade.” His next movie, in 1974, was "Freebie and the Bean". It was critically panned, though Stanley Kubrick called it “the best movie of the year.”Fact|date=September 2008

In 1981, François Truffaut was asked “Who is your favorite American director?” He answered, “I don’t know his name, but I saw his film last night and it was called "The Stunt Man".” The film was a slapstick comedy, a thriller, a romance, an action-adventure, and a commentary on America’s dismissal of veterans, as well as a deconstruction of Hollywood Cinema. The film also contains Rush’s most common protagonist, an emotionally traumatized male who has escaped the traditional frameworks of society only to find his new world (biker gangs in "Hell’s Angels on Wheels", hippies in "Psych-Out") corrupted by the same influences.

Rush did not direct another film for fourteen years. As Kenneth Turan of "The Los Angeles Times" wrote, Rush’s career seems to be “followed by the kind of miserable luck that never seems to afflict the untalented.”

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