By JAMES CHRISTIE (Bear Manor Media; 2010)
The late Richard Donner is a director who enjoyed enormous success, and not a little failure, on several high profile Hollywood productions. None of his movies (I’m consciously using the term “movie” and not “film”) are especially interesting or artistic, but nearly all are watchable and entertaining, delivering the audience-friendly goods with unapologetic aplomb. They are, in short, very much like their director, who as profiled in this, the first and only biography of Mr. Donner, comes off as an amiable but not terribly layered or complex individual.
This brings up the major problem with this book: that the life it covers simply isn’t very interesting. Raised in New York’s Mount Vernon suburbs, Donner, we learn, was a childhood troublemaker who managed to avoid any real consequences for his behavior due to his gregarious personality. That gregariousness continued to serve Donner well during his years working in television, for which he directed countless commercials and episodes of programs that included WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE (a quote from whose star Steve McQueen provides this book’s title), THE TWILIGHT ZONE and GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.
His feature directorial debut was the unimpressive potboiler X-15 in 1961. It was followed by the not-much-better features SALT AND PEPPER (1968) and TWINKY (a.k.a. LOLA; 1969), with Donner taking until his late forties, with THE OMEN (1976), to fully hit his stride as a moviemaker. That movie, an EXORCIST wannabe which Donner somehow managed to convince the distinguished Gregory Peck to headline, was a massive hit. It led to Donner being hired to helm SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, a huge success despite friction between Donner and the film’s famously erratic producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind (about whom Orson Welles also had plenty to say), and which established the template for the modern comic book movie.
Donner’s heartfelt follow-up INSIDE MOVES (1980) was financially unsuccessful, but more hits followed. They included the lousy but lucrative 1983 Richard Pryor/Jackie Gleason comedy THE TOY, the 1984 medieval romance LADYHAWKE (which Donner, in a rare instance of artistic coercion, insisted on debasing with a horrendous electronic score), the 1985 Steven Spielberg production THE GOONIES (upon which Donner was hired because Spielberg is said to have claimed, “I need an even bigger kid than me”) and 1987’s buddy cop actioner LETHAL WEAPON, a movie as influential in its way as SUPERMAN, and more directly impactful on Donner’s career, seeing as how he himself directed its three sequels.
The nineties were a step down for Donner, as he turned out movies that included RADIO FLYER (1992), ASSASSINS (1995) and CONSPIRACY THEORY (1997), which weren’t as successful as his eighties output. In the 2000s the bottom dropped out entirely, with the disastrous TIMELINE (2003) and 16 BLOCKS (2006) closing out Donner’s career on a low note.
Amid all this activity he married the producer Lauren Schuler in the eighties, thus ending his seemingly permanent commitment to bachelorhood—which as related in this book is about the most interesting non-movie related thing about Donner. Author James Christie, it must be said, does a good job, providing a readable and appropriately exhaustive depiction of Donner’s output and history. It’s not Christie’s fault that Richard Donner isn’t a terribly exciting subject.