John Milius

Also Known As: Walter Kurtz

Biography: John Frederick Milius is an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures. He was one of the writers for the first two Dirty Harry films, received an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, and wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. He wrote a number of iconic film lines such as "Charlie don't surf" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," from Apocalypse Now, and the famous Dirty Harry one-liners delivered by Clint Eastwood, including "Go ahead, make my day" and "Ask yourself one question, 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?". Milius also wrote the USS Indianapolis monologue in the film Jaws; the sequence performed by Robert Shaw. After his work on Rough Riders (1997), Milius became an instrumental force in lobbying Congress to award President Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor (posthumously), for acts of conspicuous gallantry while in combat on San Juan Hill. Milius made two films featuring Roosevelt: The Wind and the Lion (where he was played by Brian Keith) and the made-for-TV film Rough Riders (where Tom Berenger took the role). The character of John Milner from the 1973 George Lucas film American Graffiti was inspired by Milius, who was a good friend of Lucas while they were at USC film school. Likewise, the character Walter Sobchak in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, made by his friends the Coen Brothers, was partly based on Milius. The novella "Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls" by Aleksandar Hemon features an episode with Milius, who is described as "sitting at a desk sucking on a cigar as long as a walking stick." In 2013 a documentary about his life, titled Milius, was released. Writer Nat Segaloff called Milius: "The best writer of the so-called USC Mafia, a tight-knit group that resuscitated—some say homogenised American cinema in the 1970s... Raised on Ford, Hawks, Lean and Kurosawa, shaped by filmmakers as disparate as Fellini and Delmer Daves, Milius favours history books over comic books, character over special effects, and heroes with roots in reality, time, place and customs. Milius' stories reflect his own deeply held ethic, which embraces the values of tradition, adventure, spiritualism, honour and an intense loyalty to friends... Although he privately chafes at his public image as a gun-toting, liberal baiting provocateur, he allows himself to be painted as such, at times even holding the brush. He plays the Hollywood game like a pro, yet sticks to his own rules; he is a romantic filmmaker who avoids love scenes; his movies contain violence, yet no death in them is without meaning." Milius himself once said: "Never compromise excellence. To write for someone else is the biggest mistake that any writer makes. You should be your biggest competitor, your biggest critic, your biggest fan, because you don’t know what anybody else thinks. How arrogant it is to assume that you know the market, that you know what’s popular today [...] Write what you want to see. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to have any true passion in it, and it’s not going to be done with any true artistry."

Department: Writing

Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Adult: No

Birthday: April 11, 1944

Age: 81 years old

Gender: Male

Popularity:

2.08%

Known For:

The Searchers: An Appreciation
A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne and 'The Searchers'
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Hollywood Gangster
Made in Hollywood: Die Welt des Raoul Walsh
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
Frazetta: Painting with Fire
Iron and Beyond
Riding Giants
Hell Hath No Fury: The Making of The Outlaw Josey Wales
An Opera of Violence
Conan Unchained: The Making of 'Conan'
The Making of '1941'
Milius
In the Teeth of Jaws
A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope
Jaws: The Inside Story
Dino De Laurentiis: The Last Movie Mogul
The Bridge on the River Kwai: An Appreciation by Filmmaker John Milius
Conan the Barbarian
Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away
Discovering Treasure: The Story of 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'
First Works
Sword-and-Sandal: The Story of the Period Epic
A Riddle of Steel: The Definitive History of Conan the Barbarian
Deadhead Miles
A Moral Right: The Politics of Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry: The Original
The Business End: Violence in Cinema
The Wages of Sin
Shotgun Freeway
The Long Shadow of Dirty Harry
The Lion Roars Again
The Evolution of Clint Eastwood
The Craft of Dirty Harry
Something to Do with Death
Crazy Mama
Between the Lines: The True Story of Surfers and the Vietnam War