Background
Hill, Walter was born on January 10, 1942 in Long Beach, California, United States.
Hill, Walter was born on January 10, 1942 in Long Beach, California, United States.
Studied at, Mexico City College and Michigan State University.
Hill was an assistant on The Thomas Crown Affair (68, Norman Jewison) and Take the Money and Ran (69, Woody Allen). He wrote Hickey and Foggs (72, Robert Culp) as a story for two white men; he had Jason Robards and Strother Martin in mind, and “Hickey” came from Robardss stage performance in The Iceman Cometh. Commerce made it the black-and-white pairing of Culp and Bill Cosby—a trick that Hill learned well enough for Nick Ñolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS. He also did scripts for The Getaway (72, Sam Peckinpah), a singularly motivated action story; The Thief Who Came to Dinner (73, Bud Yorldn); and The Mackintosh Man (73, John Huston).
Hill admirers must look back on the nineties with regret. Wild Bill was a mess and a disaster, yet it had the makings of a fine interplay of fact and legend. It also had a hazy, umber-colored look that seemed to have soaked into the film stock for Last Man Standing—a remake of Yojimbo, set in rural and very dusty Texas that a two-year-old could have picked and predicted inside the first ten minutes (and then napped). Add to that the humiliation of Supernova—from which Hill removed his name—and you have a career coming to a standstill.
Screenplays include Hickey and Boggs, 1972, The Getaway, 1972, 1994, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, 1973, The Mackintosh Man, 1973, The Drowning Pool, 1975, The Warriors, 1979. Writer, director: Hard Times, 1975, The Driver, 1978, The Warriors, 1979, Southern Comfort, 1981, 48 Hrs., 1982, Streets of Fire, 1984, Wild Bill, 1995, Last Man Standing, 1996.Producer: Alien, 1979, Blue City, 1986. Writer, producer (with Gordon Carroll and David Giler) Aliens, 1986, Alien 3, 1992. Director: The Warriors, The Long Riders, 1980, Brewster's Millions, 1985, Crossroads, 1986, Extreme Prejudice, 1987, Johnny Handsome, 1989, Another 48 Hrs., 1990, Tresspass, 1992, Geronimo, 1993 (also producer), Supernova, 2000, Undisputed, 2002, The Phophecy, 2002, Deadwood, 2004 (Emmy award Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, 2004).
Quotations: “I very purposely—more and more so every time I do a script—give characters no back storv. The way you find out about these characters is by watching what they do, the way they react to stress, the way they react to situations and confrontations. In that way, character is revealed through drama rather than being explained through dialogue.”
Here is contemporary success without mercy, comfort, or irony. Passing lightly over details from the young Hill’s life—that he wanted to be a comic-book illustrator; that asthma kept him from the Vietnam War; that he felt “there is nothing more absurd than properly motivated characters”—one can survey the broken-down landscape of visual energy and commercial compromise.
managed with a shrug that hopes to disguise irresponsibility as cool insolence.
There has always been something in movies to sustain Hill’s fear of motivation—just as there has always been a lot in craven, lazy, and half-baked writers that flinched from it. There is something inherentlv reasonable in Hill’s further description of his own movies.
That could be Fuller or Anthony Mann; it could be some exponent for painting or ballet; and it is a credo that comes alive from time to time in the delirious momentum of the entirely artificial Streets of Fire, a beautiful and entertaining fantasy. But the concentration on action in Fuller or Mann always led us into aspects of character or life that needed to be talked about, even if their characters were generally inarticulate. There is no drama without behavior, ideas, and experience— and sooner rather than later in Hill’s work, cliché and violence had to take their place. Thus his undoubted talent for action—his eye—has rarelv regained the lightness of Streets of Fire. Brutal comedy, violence, human indifference seep in. Big movies are too large for such sparse ambition. Eventually boredom or self-loathing are likely in the underoccupied filmmaker. It may be significant that Hill was part of the team that made Alien and Aliens (as coproducer and cowriter), yet not their director.