Ted Kotcheff has died. Although his career ran the gamut from stagework, to film, to television—including a multi-year stint as part of the production team for Law And Order: Special Victims Unit—Kotcheff achieved his most prominent mainstream success with a string of Hollywood films in the 1970s and ’80s, including Fun With Dick And Jane, North Dallas Forty, original Rambo movie First Blood, and Weekend At Bernie‘s. Originally hailing from Canada, but working regularly on both sides of both the border, and the Atlantic, Kotcheff’s work spanned genres, mediums, and nations, but was unified by a firm eye for human stories. Per Variety, he died on Thursday. Kotcheff was 94.
Kotcheff got his start directing TV in Canada in the 1950s, before moving to England to continue his career. Many of his early credits come from an era of TV production that had much in common with theater, featuring live performances of teleplays. (A famous story from the era involves him having to scramble desperately to re-structure a broadcast after one of his leads died of a heart attack mid-show.) In the ’60s, Kotcheff moved back to Canada and into the world of film, eventually scoring strong notices (and a Palme d’Or nomination) for his 1971 Australian feature Wake In Fright. (The film was long considered lost, but eventually got a remastering—which also kicked off fresh controversy around Kotcheff’s decision to include actual footage of kangaroos being hunted and killed in the film. “It was just horrific,” Kotcheff, who tagged along with his camera on an already-scheduled hunt, would later say, although he defended including the footage as a depiction of the film’s often horrifying take on Outback life.)
Less grisly success would follow, including working with Richard Dreyfuss for the well-received The Apprenticeship Of Dudley Kravitz. Shortly after the film’s success, Kotcheff moved to Hollywood, where one of his first features was the George Segal/Jane Fonda comedy Fun With Dick And Jane, a modest hit. Kotcheff’s films from the next few years chart an eclectic course: The farcical Who Is Killing The Great Chefs Of Europe?, sports film North Dallas Forty, and cult story Split Image. His first genuine hit was no less weird a pick: After years of Hollywood trying to come to grips with David Morell’s novel First Blood, Kotcheff was finally the guy who landed in the director’s chair in the early ’80s, making the monumental decision to offer the lead role of disaffected vet John Rambo to Sylvester Stallone. After many actor-mandated changes to the original story (mostly centered on making a less murderous Rambo than the one from Morell’s book) and a troubled shoot, First Blood released in 1982 to completely unprecedented success, winning big with both critics and the box office. Stallone went on to make many more, much more violent Rambo movies, but Kotcheff moved on, continuing to drift between the worlds of action and comedy.
1989’s Weekend At Bernie‘s meanwhile, was not a First Blood-sized success—at least, not at the box office. But the corpse-based comedy, which starred Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, and a largely non-ambulatory Terry Kiser, was such a massive hit on cable and the afternoon movie circuit that it’s basically burned into the minds of an entire generation. It was also one of the final films of Kotcheff’s career: Although he’d make a few more movies in the 1990s, they were mostly low-budget affairs, and he eventually moved firmly back into his old TV stomping grounds. The final phase of his career was largely defined by SVU, which he joined for its second season, in 2000, and which he’d stay with through its ninth season, usually directing one or so episodes per season. In 2017, he penned a memoir, Director’s Cut: SVU star Mariska Hargitay wrote the foreword, in which she wrote of Kotcheff that he was “A man whose charisma came from an unfettered appetite for life… Ted speaks the truth, directs the truth, pulls the truth out of all the actors he works with.”
