J. Todd Anderson has died. A director and occasional actor (including on those occasions when his most frequent collaborators needed some poor sap to gun down in a Minnesota snowfield), Anderson was best known for his work as a storyboard artist, most prominently in collaboration with filmmaking duo Joel and Ethan Coen. Hired—after what was, by his own admission, a pretty desperate plea—as an artist on the pair’s second feature, Raising Arizona, Anderson would go on to make storyboards for dozens of Hollywood films, including every feature either Joel or Ethan Coen ever directed from that point onward. “I was the first person to see the movie as it tumbled out of their heads,” Anderson once said, in a book collecting his storyboards for The Big Lebowski. “If you like our movies, a lot of it is him,” Ethan Coen has noted. Anderson’s death, back on October 2, was confirmed on Saturday in an obituary by The New York Times; he was 67.
Born in Ohio to a civil servant father and an artist mother, Anderson fell in love with storyboarding while making his own short films in college. A few years later, when a friend told him they’d been hired to work on Raising Arizona, Anderson—a fan of the Coens’ first movie, Blood Simple—tagged along, and repeatedly pitched himself to the brothers as a storyboard artist. Once the pair eventually relented and hired him, he became a built-in part of their creative process, taking the brothers’ scripts and working directly alongside them to construct the first drafts of what their films would actually look like. (Looking through his published Lebowski boards, for instance, reveals how influential Anderson’s ostensibly straightforward, but also highly expressive, drawings were on everything from the movie’s visual framing to the body language adopted by Jeff Bridges and John Goodman for their roles.)
“He was like a visual savant,” Ethan Coen told the Times. “It was weird. You would refer to something visual, and he’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, I can sketch that up for you.'” Anderson contributed storyboards to every Coen brothers movie made from 1987 onward, including the current run of solo projects that each brother is currently focused on. Not that he was a two-director talent: Influenced, in part, by his role in one of the most successful cinematic runs of the last 50 years, Anderson was also frequently hired by other directors, including George Clooney, Frank Oz, and Shane Black—although none of those filmmakers gifted him with the eccentric titles the Coens often foisted on him in their movies’ credits, where his name appeared alongside “jobs” like “Drawboy,” “Pencil Grappler,” and “Nibdippler.”
Also a filmmaker in his own right, Anderson directed two movies, 1999 wrestling comedy The Naked Man (which carried a writing credit from Ethan Coen) and 2008’s extremely strange-looking My Mummy. (The former film, about a chiropractor who begins moonlighting as a professional wrestler, once provoked co-star Rachael Leigh Cook to declare, in a 2020 Random Roles with us, “I can’t even believe that this happened and got made and is a movie that people can watch.”) When asked by the Times about who he or his brother might work with in a storyboarding capacity now, Ethan Coen was blunt: “I have no idea. It’s too dismal to even think about.”
Keep scrolling for more great stories.