John G. Avildsen

John G. Avildsen (born December 21, 1935, Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.—died June 16, 2017, Los Angeles, California) was an American film director best known for the aspirational boxing classic Rocky (1976) and the Karate Kid martial-arts film franchise.

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Avildsen began working in the 1960s as an assistant director on various films while holding a day job as a director of television commercials for an advertising agency. His first directing credits were on sexploitation movies, but he garnered attention with the low-budget drama Joe (1970); it starred Peter Boyle as a virulent racist who reacts violently to the hippie counterculture that seems to be hemming him in. Joe captured the country’s polarized mood and became a surprise hit, but neither the low-budget Cry Uncle! (1971), starring Allen Garfield as a private detective, nor The Stoolie (1972), with Jackie Mason in the title role, enjoyed the same result. Avildsen’s next project, the drama Save the Tiger (1973), failed to connect with moviegoers, but Jack Lemmon won an Academy Award for his performance as a businessman wallowing in a midlife crisis. The lively W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975) found Burt Reynolds playing an amiable Southern con man, with supporting performances by Jerry Reed and Ned Beatty.

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In 1976 Avildsen scored a major box-office hit with Rocky, the now-legendary Sylvester Stallone project about inarticulate but sensitive boxer Rocky Balboa, who dreams of becoming a champion. Avildsen won an Oscar for best director, and the film was also named best picture. However, the romantic drama Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978) and The Formula (1980), a conspiracy thriller with Marlon Brando and George C. Scott, illustrated Avildsen’s unfortunate tendency to follow victory with defeat. His adaptation of Thomas Berger’s novel Neighbors (1981), starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, was also a critical and commercial disappointment, as was the romance A Night in Heaven (1983).

In 1984, however, Avildsen again found box-office success, with The Karate Kid. The immensely popular Rocky-ish tale centres on a teenage weakling (played by Ralph Macchio) whose life turns around after some tutelage in philosophy and martial arts from an unassuming Japanese janitor (Pat Morita); Avildsen edited the picture himself. The Karate Kid, Part II (1986) fared even better at the box office.

Happy New Year (1987) and For Keeps (1988) disappeared without a trace, but Lean on Me (1989), an inspirational biopic based on the exploits of New Jersey school principal Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman), was a hit. The Karate Kid, Part III (1989), Rocky V (1990), and The Power of One (1992) were all sports-themed, as was the little-seen 8 Seconds (1994), starring Luke Perry as a doomed rodeo star. In 1999 Avildsen ventured into the thriller genre again with Desert Heat (also released as Inferno), which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme; the film was loosely based on the 1961 classic Yojimbo by Kurosawa Akira.