Ted Kotcheff, the unheralded Canadian moviemaker who moved gracefully among genres to direct such notable films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s, has died. He was 94.
Kotcheff, who went on to spend 13 seasons as an executive producer on the gritty Dick Wolf series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, died Thursday, The Globe and Mail newspaper reported.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), starring Richard Dreyfuss as a young hustler, is widely considered to be among the finest Canadian films ever made, and Kotcheff also directed a feature very high of the list of the best movies to come out of Australia — the harrowing thriller Wake in Fright (1971).
The Toronto native, who started his admired 60-year career directing for live television, also helmed the social satire Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), starring George Segal and Jane Fonda; the Nick Nolte-Mac Davis dark pro football drama North Dallas Forty (1979); and the action flick Uncommon Valor (1983), starring Gene Hackman.
Kotcheff and future Hill Street Blues co-creator Michael Kozoll had adapted a book by Canadian writer David Morrell into a movie script for Warner Bros. When the studio passed on the project, Orion Pictures snapped it up, and on Kotcheff’s suggestion, hired Sylvester Stallone to star as John Rambo, a former Green Beret on a suicide mission.
Made for about $16 million, First Blood (1982) grossed more than $125 million worldwide ($317 million today), gave Stallone his first post-Rocky hit and spawned three sequels — none of which Kotcheff wanted anything to do with.
“They offered me the first sequel, and after I read the script I said, ‘In the first film he doesn’t kill anybody. In this film he kills 75 people,’ ” Kotcheff recalled in a 2016 interview with Filmmaker magazine. “It seemed to be celebrating the Vietnam War, which I thought was one of the stupidest wars in history.
“Fifty-five-thousand young Americans died and so many veterans committed suicide. I couldn’t turn myself inside out like that and make that kind of picture. Of course, I could have been a rich man today — that sequel made $300 million.”
Kotcheff tackled material of a different sort when he directed the cadaver comedy Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), about two insurance-company employees (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who attempt to convince partygoers that their stiff, embezzling boss (Terry Kiser) is still alive.
Kotcheff didn’t want to do a sequel to that one either, saying that he had run out of dead-man jokes.
William Theodore Kotcheff was born on April 7, 1931, in Depression-era Toronto to Bulgarian-Macedonian parents. He worked for a slaughterhouse and for Goodyear Tire & Rubber and graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in English literature.
Kotcheff got his start at the Canadian Broadcasting Co. in 1952 at the dawn of the TV age, first as a stagehand and then, at 24, as the country’s youngest drama director.
A 1953 trip to New York City, his first to the U.S., to see Broadway plays ended with Kotcheff being arrested by border agents after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police betrayed him to the FBI for a brief association with a left-wing book club.
He was briefly jailed, branded a communist and sent back north. That banishment in 1957 led Kotcheff, eager to go abroad, to London, where he directed for television and the theater for more than a decade.
Kotcheff managed to get through a live 1958 teleplay about a nuclear bomb going off in the underground even though lead actor Gareth Jones had died while getting his makeup applied mere minutes before the show was to go on the air.
Working on the fly like that — and on different subjects — served him well. “I did an anthology series of one-hour hour plays. One week I would be doing a drama. The next week I would be doing a comedy, the next I would be doing a history play. You could see what you were good at,” he said in a 2016 interview.
After Kotcheff directed Laurence Harvey and Jean Simmons in the drama Life at the Top (1965), Michelangelo Antonioni called and asked him for suggestions on how to take 20 minutes out of Blow-Up.
“I gave him about 18 minutes’ worth of cutting suggestions, and surprisingly he used almost all of them,” Kotcheff said.
In 1968, while directing a fundraiser at Royal Albert Hall that protested the practice of apartheid in South Africa, a musician accidentally set a U.S. flag on fire, getting Kotcheff into more trouble with American authorities.
“First a communist and now a flag burner!” he would write in his 2017 autobiography, Director’s Cut: My Life in Film. Kotcheff noted that he wasn’t allowed back into the States until 1972.
But, able to work in Australia, Kotcheff helmed the unsettling Wake in Fright, about a schoolteacher (Gary Bond) who gets stranded in the outback and must deal with a group of brutal beer-swillers. (Kotcheff allowed Peter Weir, then a youngster, to shadow him during production.)
Kotcheff accompanied Wake in Fright to the Cannes Film Festival — it was nominated for the Palme d’Or — but when the distrubutor went into bankruptcy, Wake in Fright disappeared from theaters and wasn’t seen for decades.
He returned to the Croisette in 2009 for a red-carpet screening of the film, introduced by Martin Scorsese. Roger Ebert called Wake in Fright “powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing. It comes billed as a ‘horror film’ and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic.”
He won a BAFTA award in 1972 for directing Edna, the Inebriate Woman, about a homeless woman, for the BBC.
A year later, Kotcheff made his way back to Canada to direct the low-budget indie The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, with Dreyfuss portraying the ambitious son of a working-class Jewish family in Montreal. He had trouble finding his lead, but a recommendation from casting legend Lynn Stalmaster brought him to Dreyfuss.
“As soon as Richard opened his mouth, it was electric! He had Duddy’s manic energy,” Kotcheff said.
Mordecai Richler, Kotcheff’s onetime roommate in London, adapted his 1959 novel for the screenplay (the two also had collaborated on Life at the Top). Duddy Kravitz won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and led Kotcheff to follow fellow Canadian filmmakers Norman Jewison and Arthur Hiller to Hollywood.
“The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the axis on which my career and, in many ways, my life, has rotated,” Kotcheff wrote in his memoir.
Fun With Dick and Jane (1977) was his first major American studio film. He followed that with Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), another comedy starring Segal, and then North Dallas Forty (1979), which he also co-wrote.
His film résumé also included Tiara Tahiti (1962), starring James Mason; the Gregory Peck Western Billy Two-Hats (1974); Joshua Then and Now (1985), another adaptation of a Richler novel, this one starring James Woods; the Burt Reynolds-Kathleen Turner comedy Switching Channels (1988); and Winter People (1989), featuring Kurt Russell.
In the late 1990s, Wolf, a fan of North Dallas Forty and Duddy Kravitz, pitched Kotcheff on the idea for a cop series about sex crimes and the psychology behind them.
“What connection Dick found between the existential problems of a pro football player and a Jewish hustler trying to become someone and sex crimes in New York City, I didn’t have the foggiest idea,” he wrote in his book. “But I wasn’t about to complain.”
Law & Order: SVU took Kotcheff from directing to producing, and he cast Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay as detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson. (Hargitay supplied the foreword for his book.)
His assistant once told him that he had auditioned more than 27,000 actors for SVU. “I’ve used just about every actor in New York,” Kotcheff said.
The NBC drama took him back to his early days in live television, when he and his creative team were forever rushing to production on tight deadlines. He also directed seven episodes, including the 100th installment of the series, which had the cops looking for a person who had cut off a man’s genitals and left them in an abandoned subway station.
Kotcheff ran SVU for 13 seasons and more than 280 episodes, through 2012. Nearly 60 years after launching his career at the CBC in Toronto, Kotcheff bid farewell to the show. “It was one of the richest — and certainly the longest contiguous — experiences of my career,” he wrote.
His wife, Sylvia Kay, died in January 2019 at age 82. She had appeared in Wake in Fright.
A documentary about his life, The Apprenticeship of Ted Kotcheff, narrated by Dreyfuss, is in the works.
