Some awful news has arrived this morning with the announcement that the great director Jonathan Demme has passed away at the age of 73.
Demme began his career, like many of his generation, working for exploitation producer Roger Corman, writing and producing two movies before making his directorial debut with Corman’s prison movie “Caged Heat” in 1974. He broke through to the mainstream with CB-radio comedy “Citizens Band,” before making Roy Scheider thriller “Last Embrace” and the beautiful comedy “Melvin And Howard” in 1980, a film that wasn’t a hit back then, but has grown in reputation over time, now cited as a favorite of Paul Thomas Anderson and others (Anderson’s been a consistent booster of Demme). He also moved into documentary, helming the all-time great Talking Heads concert doc “Stop Making Sense” in 1984, and the Spalding Gray monologue movie “Swimming To Cambodia” in 1987.
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Success would arrive with the comedies “Swing Shift” and especially “Something Wild” in the 1980s, before he took a major shift, with enormous success, with “The Silence Of The Lambs” in 1991. The thriller won Demme an Oscar for Best Director, and it remains the last film to win the big five prizes at the Academy Awards, also taking Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress
Further awards success followed with “Philadelphia” in 1993, and while not all of his movies after that connected with audiences — “The Manchurian Candidate” was a hit and “Rachel Getting Married” a critical darling, while “Beloved” and the more recent “Ricki And The Flash” got more mixed responses — his films remained consistently fascinating, with a loose, ever-shifting style and a great feeling for performances no matter who he was working with.
Demme won great reviews last year for his Netflix Justin Timberlake concert movie “Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids” (having also made four films with Neil Young across the 2000s), and his final work as director, an episode of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Fox drama “Shots Fired,” airs, in an eerie coincidence, tonight. The best tribute to one of the greatest American directors would be to watch it, and then watch two more of his movies tonight. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones today.