Biography for
Jack Hill (I) More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

Mini Biography

Jack Hill grew up around movies - his father was a designer for the Disney studios and Warner Brothers. He went to the University of California to study film, where he was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola - they worked together on student productions and later both apprenticed with Roger Corman, working on The Terror (1963). While Coppola went on to Oscardom, Jack continued with B-flicks. He didn't make a lot of films, and while all were low budget they all (except The Jezebels (1975)) made money, and his early 'blaxploitaton' films Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) were hits. Soon after The Jezebels (1975) he stopped making movies so he and his wife Elke could pursue meditation and he could write novels. Today his films are hailed as cult classics, thanks primarily to Quentin Tarantino, who saw Hill's work as it made its way to video. With retrospectives and a re-release of The Jezebels (1975), his career seems to be reviving.

Spouse

Trivia

After working with Jack Nicholson in The Terror (1963) he classed Jack as a terrible actor, but when he saw him in The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) he rethought his opinion - Jack had just been miscast in Roger Corman films.

Attended Hollywood High School.

His UCLA student movie The Host (1960) was a huge influence on the last third of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).

Interviewed in "Wild Beyond Belief: Interviews with Exploitation Filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s" by Brian Albright (McFarland & Co.).

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