Career
After college, the California native moved to Los Angeles settling himself in Hollywood, more precisely near Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, one of the toughest corners in Los Angeles at the time. Living among prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, junkies and the homeless, the setting gave Lawton a wide range of inspiration for his stories. He wrote a number of screenplays while working at several post-productions companies.
During that time he met the famous producer Charles Band who got interested in one of his screenplays. The result,Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death was a take-off of both Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's feature Apocalypse Now. Shot in less than two weeks in his hometown of Riverside, California, the film, starring his longtime friend Bill Maher, Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed and sex symbol Adrienne Barbeau became a cult favorite and late-night cable staple.
After Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Lawton also wrote and directed Pizza Man, a political satire about a delivery man investigating a comical government conspiracy. Talk show host Bill Maher also stars in Pizza Man along with comedian Annabelle Gurwitch. In both movies, he used the pseudonym JD Athens.
Read more about this topic: J. F. Lawton
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a mans career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
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“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partners job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)