The Times, UK
October 25, 2013 Friday 12:01 AM GMT
Richard Sarafian; American film director who had an influential
one-off hit with the road movie Vanishing Point
SECTION: OBITUARIES
Richard C. Sarafian worked as a director in American film and
television from the 1960s to the 1980s, making episodes of numerous
hit series and overseeing a string of solid, if unremarkable Hollywood
movies. However, he made one film that jumps out from his resume as
something special and prompted a public acknowledgement from Quentin
Tartantino of its influence on his own work.
Vanishing Pointarrived in cinemas in 1971 at the height of a road
movie boom prompted by the success of Easy Rider (1969), but what
distinguished it from other low-budget films aiming to cash inwas a
strange existential quality that owed as much to Albert Camus as it
did to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.
The protagonist Kowalski (Barry Newman) is a Vietnam vet and former
racing driver, who speeds across America in a Dodge Challenger to win
a bet that he can get from Denver to San Francisco in a day. He is
pursued by increasing numbers of law officers and encouraged by
Super-Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind African-American disc jockey who
calls him “the last beautiful free soul on this planet”.
Despite the need for speed, Kowalski finds time on his odyssey for
encounters with an old prospector, hippies, gay muggers and a
beautiful naked woman on a motorbike. In the end Kowalski accelerates
into a road block and goes up in a ball of flame.
Sarafian went on to make films with Richard Harris, Burt Reynolds and
Sean Connery, but they did little at the box office, and by the second
half of the 1970s he was back in television, remaking The African
Queen (1977), with Warren Oates in Humphrey Bogart’s role.
Richard Caspar Sarafian was born in 1930 into an Armenian immigrant
family in New York City. At New York University he started pre-med and
pre-law, but switched to film because it seemed easier.
Subsequently he worked for the US Army’s news service and while based
in Kansas City he met the young Robert Altman, who was five years
Sarafian’s senior and was just getting started in the entertainment
business.
Sarafian acted in a play that Altman was staging, they worked together
at the Calvin Company, a Kansas-based company that was one of the most
significant producers of industrial and educational films, and they
continued to work together in television.
Initially Sarafian worked as Altman’s assistant but by the early 1960s
they were often directing different instalments of the same series,
contributing episodes to the hit westerns Maverick, Lawman and
Bonanza. Off-set they became closer than ever when Sarafian married
Altman’s sister Helen. They would later divorce and then remarry.
Sarafian also directed the 1963 Twilight Zone story Living Doll, with
Telly Savalas, and worked on episodes of other popular series before
coming to England to direct Run Wild, Run Free (1969). It starred John
Mills and Mark Lester as a troubled boy who has not spoken for years,
but who forms a relationship with a wild horse.
Sarafian had directed four films by the time he made Vanishing Point
and it was not a major commercial hit when it first came out, but it
did well enough to set him up for his choice of projects. On paper his
next few films had all the ingredients of major hits but none of them
really lived up to expectations and subsequently Sarafian worked
mainly in television. He also appeared regularly as an actor in films
in the 1990s, playing a gangster in Warren Beatty’s Bugsy (1991) and a
detective in Don Juan DeMarco (1994).
Vanishing Point had acquired the status of cult classic, it was remade
for television with Viggo Mortensen in 1997 and Tarantino acknowledged
Sarafian’s influence with a “special thanks” credit on his film Death
Proof (2007).
Sarafian said: “I had absolutely no idea that this thing would survive
all these years. We worked hard in the hot sun and we partied at
night. You just hope, like everything, that you blow the audience a
few kisses and try to fulfill your vision of what it’s about …..
freedom, an endless road, and let the cards fall where they may.”
His wife predeceased him and he is survived by their five children,
all of whom work in the film industry.
Richard Sarafian, film and television director, was born on April 28,
1930. He died of pneumonia on September 18, 2013, aged 83
From: Baghdasarian