Sunday, August 19, 2012

Tony Scott, DEAD (1944-06-21, 2012-08-19)

Tony Scott dies with 68.
I love some of his movies like: "Top Gun", "Beverly Hills Cop II", "Days of Thunder", "The Last Boy Scout", "True Romance", "Enemy of the State", "The Taking of Pelham 123" and "Unstoppable".

Here it goes the story of Tony Scott from Wikipedia

Thanks to Tony Scott on Wikipedia

Anthony David "Tony" Scott (21 June 1944 – 19 August 2012) was a British film director and producer. He was the younger brother of film director Ridley Scott.

His films were generally more popular with audiences than critics, and include The Hunger (1983), Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Days of Thunder (1990), The Last Boy Scout (1991), True Romance (1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Enemy of the State (1998), Spy Game (2001), Man on Fire (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) and Unstoppable (2010). He died on 19 August 2012, committing suicide by jumping off the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

Early life

Scott was born in North Shields, England, the youngest of three sons of Colonel Francis Percy Scott, who served in the Royal Engineers, and Elizabeth. He followed in his elder brother's footsteps, studying at Grangefield School, West Hartlepool College of Art and Sunderland Art School, for a fine arts degree. At the age of 16, he appeared in Boy and Bicycle, a short film marking the directorial debut of his then 23-year-old brother Ridley.

Scott studied art in Leeds after failing to gain admission to the Royal College of Art in London at his first attempt. He made a short film in 1969 based on the Ambrose Bierce story One of the Missing. As Ridley had previously cast him in a film, he reciprocated by giving his brother a role too. "The movie cost £1,000", he recalled in April 2012. Whilst at the Royal College of Art, he starred in "Don't Walk", a film by fellow students, Hank Onrust and Richard Stanley: the film credits state it was "made for BUNAC by MARCA films at the Royal College of Art". He graduated from the Royal College of Art, following in the footsteps of his elder brother Ridley, with the intention of becoming a painter. His eldest brother Frank had earlier joined the Merchant Navy.

Hollywood success

Following the success of Top Gun, Scott found himself on Hollywood's A-list of action directors. He re-teamed with Simpson and Bruckheimer in 1987 to direct Eddie Murphy and Brigitte Nielsen in the highly anticipated sequel Beverly Hills Cop II. While not being critically embraced, the picture nevertheless became one of the year's highest grossers. His next film, Revenge (1990), a thriller of adultery and revenge set in Mexico, starred Kevin Costner, Madeleine Stowe and Anthony Quinn. Once again directing Tom Cruise, Scott returned to the Simpson-Bruckheimer fold to helm the big-budget racing film Days of Thunder (1990). Scott later stated that it was difficult to find the drama in racing cars in circles, so he "stole from all race movies to date ... then tried to build on them." Scott's next film was the cult action thriller The Last Boy Scout (1991) starring Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans and written by Shane Black.

In 1993, Scott directed True Romance costing just $13m, from a script by Quentin Tarantino. The cast included Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Tom Sizemore, Chris Penn, Val Kilmer and in bit roles, James Gandolfini and Samuel L. Jackson. Although it received positive reviews from Janet Maslin and other critics, it took less than $13m and was considered a box office failure. Scott's next film, Crimson Tide (1995), was a submarine thriller starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington. His follow-up film, 1996's The Fan, starred Robert De Niro, Wesley Snipes, Ellen Barkin and Benicio del Toro. Scott's 1998 film Enemy of the State, a conspiracy thriller, starred Will Smith and Gene Hackman, and was his highest-grossing film of the decade. Spy Game was released in November 2001. It garnered 63% positive reviews at Metacritic and made a little over $60m at the US box office. Man on Fire was released in April 2004 and made over $75m at the U.S. box office.

Scott and his brother Ridley Scott were co-producers of the TV series Numb3rs, which aired from 2005 to 2010. Tony Scott directed the first episode of the fourth season. In 2006, he contributed voice-over to a song called Dreamstalker on Hybrid's album I Choose Noise; Scott has worked together with Hybrid on several films through mutual friend Harry Gregson-Williams.

Next for Scott came Domino (2005) starring Keira Knightley. In autumn 2006, Scott reteamed with Denzel Washington for the futuristic action film Déjà Vu. Scott once again teamed up with Denzel Washington on The Taking of Pelham 123, which also starred John Travolta and was released in theatres on 12 June 2009. The film was a remake of the 1974 film of the same title starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. 2009 also saw the debut of The Good Wife, a legal drama television series which had Scott and his brother as two of several executive producers.

In 2010, the Scott brothers produced the feature film adaptation of the television series The A-Team. Scott's film, Unstoppable, again starring Washington (with Chris Pine), was released in November 2010. Shortly before his death he produced Coma, an A&E miniseries, the Coca-Cola short film The Polar Bears and the thiller Stoker, both with his brother.

Directing style

Katey Rich of Cinema Blend wrote that Scott had a "trademark frenetic camera style", which Scott spoke about in June 2009, in reference to The Taking of Pelham 123:

It's about energy and it's about momentum, and I think the movie's very exciting, and it's not one individual thing. The true excitement comes from the actors—that gives you the true drama—and whatever I can do with the camera, that's icing on the cake. I wanted the movie to grab you. I use four cameras and I maybe do three takes—so the actors love it. Maybe I move it more than I should, but that's the nature of the way I am.

Scott also spoke about his career in general:

What always leads me in terms of my movies are characters. [I tell my production team] 'Go into the real world, cast these people in the real world, and find me role models for my writers.' Then I reverse-engineer. I don't change the structure of the script, but I use my research. That's always been my mantra, and that's what gets me excited, because I get to educate and entertain myself in terms of worlds I could never normally touch, other than the fact that I'm a director. [...] If you look at my body of work, there's always a dark side to my characters. They've always got a skeleton in the closet, they've always got a subtext. I like that. Whether it's Bruce Willis in Last Boy Scout or Denzel Washington in The Taking of Pelham 123. I think fear, and there's two ways of looking at fear. The most frightening thing I do in my life is getting up and shooting movies. Commercials, movies, every morning I'm bolt upright on one hour two hours sleep, before the alarm clock goes off. That's a good thing. That fear motivates me, and I enjoy that fear. I'm perverse in that way. I do other things. I've rock climbed all my life. Whenever I finish a movie, I do multi-day ascents, I go hang on a wall in Yosemite. That fear is tangible. That's black and white. I can make this hold or that hold. The other fear is intangible, it's very abstract, and that's more frightening.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that Scott was "one of the most influential film directors of the past 25 years, if also one of the most consistently and egregiously underloved by critics" and called him "[o]ne of the pop futurists of the contemporary blockbuster". She felt that "[t]here was plenty about his work that was problematic and at times offensive, yet it could have terrific pop, vigor, beauty and a near pure cinema quality. These were, more than anything, films by someone who wanted to pull you in hard and never let you go." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote that "the propulsive, at times borderline preposterous popcorn-thriller storylines; the slice-and-dice editing and the images that somehow managed to glow with grit; the fireball violence, often glimpsed in smeary-techno telephoto shots; the way he had of making actors seem volatile and dynamic and, at the same time, lacking almost any subtext" were qualities of Scott's films that both "excited audiences about his work" and "kept him locked outside the gates of critical respectability."

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that after Top Gun, Scott "found his commercial niche as a brash, flashy, sometimes vulgar action painter on celluloid", citing Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, and The Fan as examples. McCarthy concluded that Unstoppable, Scott's final film, was one of his best: Apart from having "its director's fingerprints all over it: the commitment to extreme action, frenetic cutting, stripped-down dialogue", McCarthy found "a social critique embedded in its guts; it was about disconnected working-class stiffs living marginal lives on society's sidings, about the barely submerged anger of a neglected underclass", something which "always had been lacking from Tony Scott's work, some connection to the real world rather than just silly flyboy stuff and meaningful glances accompanied by this year's pop music hit." Betsy Sharkey of The Los Angeles Times wrote that Denzel Washington—who starred in Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Unstoppable—was Scott's muse, and Scott "was at his best when Washington was in the picture. The characters the actor played are the archetype of the kind of men Scott made. At their core, and what guided all the actions that followed, was a fundamental decency. They were flawed men to be sure, some more than others, but men who accorded dignity to anyone who deserved it."

Personal life

Scott married three times. His first marriage was to Academy Award winning TV production designer Gerry Boldy (1944–2007) in 1967. They were divorced in 1974. His second marriage was in 1986 to advertising executive Glynis Sanders. They divorced a year later when his affair with Brigitte Nielsen, whom he met on the set of Beverly Hills Cop II, became public. She was married to Sylvester Stallone at the time. He subsequently met film and TV actress Donna Wilson, who was 24 years younger, on the set of Days of Thunder in 1990; they married in 1994. She gave birth to their twin sons, Frank and Max, in 2000.

Death

On 19 August 2012, at approximately 12:30 pm PDT, Scott committed suicide by jumping off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in the San Pedro port district of Los Angeles, California. Investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division found contact information in a note left in his car, parked on the bridge, and a note at his office for his family. Witnesses said he did not hesitate before jumping. His body was recovered from the water by the Los Angeles Port Police. On 22 August, LA County coroner's spokesman Ed Winters said the two notes Scott left behind made no mention of any health issues and did not explain why he committed suicide.

On 22 October 2012, the Los Angeles County coroner's office announced that cause of death was "multiple blunt force injuries". Therapeutic levels of mirtazapine and eszopiclone were in his system at the time of death. A coroner's official also affirmed Scott "did not have any serious underlying medical conditions" and was not suffering from cancer.

Funeral and legacy

A family press release on 22 August stated that "The family will announce plans after Labor Day for a gathering to celebrate the life and work of Tony Scott. Details will be forthcoming once they are formalized." The family also announced that they had established a scholarship fund at the American Film Institute in Scott's name, stating: "The family ask that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the fund to help encourage and engage future generations of filmmakers." He was cremated, and his ashes were interred at a private family funeral on 24 August in Los Angeles. Subsequently it was reported that he had left his estate to his family trust.

He is survived by his wife, Donna Wilson Scott, their twin sons, and his brother, film director Ridley Scott. Many actors paid tribute to him, including Tom Cruise, Christian Slater, Val Kilmer, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Elijah Wood, Dane Cook, Dwayne Johnson, Stephen Fry, Peter Fonda, and Keira Knightley, as well as musical collaborators Hybrid. Cruise stated; "He was a creative visionary whose mark on film is immeasurable." Denzel Washington, Scott's most frequent acting collaborator, said, "Tony Scott was a great director, a genuine friend and it is unfathomable to think that he is now gone." Directors UK chairman Charles Sturridge commented: "Tony Scott was a brilliant British director with an extraordinary ability to create energy on screen, both in action and in the creation of character."

Django Unchained was declared in memory of him and his brother Ridley's new film The Counselor will also be declared in memory of him as well.

Filmography

Films

Features
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Television

Others

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Commercials

Tony Scott
Tony Scott.jpg
Tony Scott in 2012
Born Anthony David Scott
21 June 1944
North Shields, England, United Kingdom
Died 19 August 2012 (aged 68)
San Pedro, Los Angeles, California, United States
Cause of death Jumping from a bridge (suicide)
Nationality English
Citizenship British
Occupation Film director and producer
Years active 1969–2012
Influenced by Ridley Scott, Nicholas Roeg, Roman Polanski
Influenced Richard Kelly, Joe Carnahan
Spouse(s) Gerry Boldy
(m. 1967–1974, divorced)
Glynis Staunton
(m. 1986–1987, divorced)
Donna W. Wilson
(m. 1994–2012; his death)
Children 2
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