http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/arts/08strick.html
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: June 7, 2010
Joseph Strick, an Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter and
producer known for filming the unfilmable in particular weighty,
bawdy literary works whose screen adaptations often ran afoul of
censors worldwide died on June 1 in Paris. He was 86 and had made
his home in Paris since the 1970s.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son David said.
An independent filmmaker, Mr. Strick won the Oscar for best
documentary short subject in 1970 for "Interviews With My Lai
Veterans," which he wrote, produced and directed. The film featured
conversations with United States Army veterans who had been present
at the massacre of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968.
Mr. Strick was even better known for fiction films based on the work
of dense, often risqué writers. His most renowned included
adaptations of "The Balcony," by Jean Genet; "Ulysses," by James
Joyce; and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer."
Mr. Strick's "Balcony" (1963), which he directed and helped produce,
was based on Genet's allegorical play about a brothel. With a
screenplay by Ben Maddow, it starred Shelley Winters.
His next adaptation was his most celebrated and most daunting: a
screen version of "Ulysses," Joyce's earthy stream-of-consciousness
novel about a day in the life of the Dubliner Leopold Bloom. First
serialized in 1918, it was banned in the United States from 1921 to 1933.
"Ulysses" was an Everest on which no filmmaker dared make an assault.
Mr. Strick did, directing and helping produce the film version, whose
screenplay he wrote with Fred Haines.
Though shorter than the book, the script left intact Joyce's original
language, including much of Molly Bloom's soliloquy, a ribald reverie
unquotable here with the possible exception of the words "yes," "I,"
"said" and "yes."
Reviewing the film in The New York Times in 1967, Bosley Crowther
wrote, "Everything in this brilliant rendering of Mr. Joyce's
extremely complex book into the medium of motion pictures is forceful
and respectable cinema art."
The film's success (Mr. Strick and Mr. Haines received Oscar
nominations for their screenplay) did not always mollify the censors.
Britain demanded 29 separate cuts, though they later backed down. In
Ireland, the film was banned outright, a ban not lifted until 2000.
With "Tropic of Cancer" (1970), Mr. Strick brought to the screen
Miller's forthright tale of his escapades, overwhelmingly sexual, in
1930s Paris. The film, which Mr. Strick directed, helped produce and,
with Betty Botley, wrote, starred Rip Torn as Miller.
In March 1970, Mr. Strick filed suit in federal district court,
seeking to overturn the X rating awarded to the film by the Motion
Picture Association of America. As he told The New York Times, "I'm
hoping the suit will lead to the abolition of the entire system of
classification."
He had no such luck, losing the case in the early '70s. "Tropic of
Cancer" retained its X rating until the early 1990s, when, with many
other X-rated films, it was awarded the new NC-17 rating.
Mr. Strick's other films include "Ring of Bright Water" (1969), which
he helped produce, and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
(1977), an adaptation of another Joyce novel, which he directed and
helped produce.
Joseph Ezekiel Strick was born on July 6, 1923, in Braddock, Pa., and
reared in Philadelphia. He studied physics at the University of
California, Los Angeles, before enlisting in the military in World
War II. During the war he served stateside as an aerial photographer
for the Army Air Forces.
His first film, "Muscle Beach," a 1948 study of California
bodybuilders directed with Irving Lerner, remains a cult favorite.
Mr. Strick's first marriage, to the former Anne Laskin, ended in
divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Martine Rossignol Strick;
three children from his first marriage, David, Jeremy and Betsy
Strick; two children from his second marriage, Terence and Helene
Strick-Marchand; a brother, Jack; a sister, Maida Gordon; and six
grandchildren.
Several of Mr. Strick's films were known for their grittiness. The
most notable was "The Savage Eye" (1960), a documentary-style fiction
film he wrote, produced and directed in collaboration with Mr. Maddow
and Sidney Meyers. The film, whose style and subject matter unusual
for the time attracted wide attention in the news media, starred
Barbara Baxley as a divorced woman navigating the seamy underside of
Los Angeles.
Mr. Strick also helped produce "Never Cry Wolf" (1983) for Walt
Disney Pictures.
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