Richard Rush (director) - Biography

Biography

Rush spent his childhood fascinated by Marcel Proust and Batman comics. 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:

After his propaganda work, Rush opened a production company to produce commercials and industrial films. At the age of thirty, inspired by the neo-realism of French director François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Rush sold his production business to finance his first feature Too Soon to Love (1960), which he produced on a shoestring budget of $50,000 and sold to Universal Pictures for distribution. Too Soon to Love is considered the first product of the "American New Wave." It also marked the second film appearance of Jack Nicholson (who starred in two later Rush films, Hells Angels on Wheels and Psych-Out).

Rush directed three films for AIP in the late 1960s exploring counter-cultures of the period and also introducing racking focus, a technique Rush claims to have discovered and named. Rush's first studio effort was 1970's Getting Straight, starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen. The film did well commercially and was deemed by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to be the "best American film of the decade." Rush's next movie, in 1974, was Freebie and the Bean. For the most part, Freebie was critically panned, though director Stanley Kubrick called it "the best movie of the year."

In 1981, 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, which took Rush nine years to put together, 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 features Rush's typical protagonist, an emotionally traumatized male who has escaped the traditional frameworks of society only to find his new world (biker gangs in Hells Angels on Wheels, hippies in Psych-Out) corrupted by the same influences. The Stunt Man won Rush Oscar nominations for best producer and best script.

When Air America showed signs of trouble during development, Rush was given $4 million to walk away from the project. This allowed the studio to cast Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr.

Rush did not direct another film for fourteen years — 1994's critically panned Color of Night. Afterward, Rush retreated from the world of commercial cinema. 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."

His most recent project is a DVD documentary on the making of The Stunt Man entitled The Sinister Saga of Making The Stunt Man (2001).

He currently resides in Bel Air with his wife Claudia. He has an older brother, Dr. Stephen Rush who also resides in Los Angeles.