GEORGE HICKENLOOPER: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the film director George Hickenlooper is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. Hearts Of Darkness remains one of the best docs about movies ever done, but his Hellman documentary is well worth seeing, and I found Reel Conversations, his collection of interviews with both filmmakers and critics, very useful.

I have to say that, although The Big Brass Ring does deserve a wider audience, it won't necessarily reward that audience. It occurs to me that Hickenlooper may have caught some of Orson Welles' creative insouciance -- there's a layer of artificiality about it which sometimes seems arch, though it does pick up some resonance when you consider his cousin John, who went from micro-brewery to governor of Colorado (and started out at my university, Wesleyan, the one just up I95, as Doonesbury would say, from Walden....