This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 2, 2010 -George Hickenlooper, the film director who died over the weekend at the age of 47, was a St. Louis native who loved making movies here and was trying to get financing so he could make his next film in St. Louis.
He talked to family and friends about moving back to the city so his only child, Charles, 9, might attend his alma mater St. Louis University High.
The cause of death is suspected to be heart failure. Both paternal grandparents and many of his father's family had died of heart ailments, some in their 50s, said his father George Hickenlooper Jr., a Lindenwood English and creative writing professor and playwright. But his father, his widow Suzanne DiMello of Culver City, Calif., and several friends said Mr. Hickenlooper had had no previous heart problems.
"He worked all the time, all the time very hard," said his mother Barbara Wenger of St. Louis. "He just loved campaigning, too."
On His Movies
Beacon movie critic Harper Barnes writes: Throughout his busy career, Hickenlooper continued to reject the values of Hollywood and fight what he saw as its corrupting influence. He made a lot of powerful people mad, and yet his talent was such that he always had work. Beginning in 1988 with a television documentary about Hollywood rebel Dennis Hopper - "Art, Acting and the Suicide Chair" - Hickenlooper created more than a dozen feature-length narrative films and documentaries, movies that more often than not asked knotty moral questions and ended in irresolution.
Besides about eight documentaries of varying length, Hickenlooper made half a dozen feature films, notably:
"Factory Girl" (2006), starring young Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, the self-destructive socialite who became one of artist Andy Warhol's so-called "superstars";
"The Man from Elysian Fields" (2001), with Andy Garcia as a failed writer who reluctantly becomes a paid male escort and Jagger as an aging roue;
"The Low Life" (1995), a semi-autobiographical drama about bright young men down and out in Hollywood.
Mr. Hickenlooper was in Denver to help his cousin, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, campaign for governor.
Hickenlooper III was born in St. Louis and lived first in Dogtown. His mother recalled being stunned by the boy's observation powers one night when he was maybe 4 -- long before he started kindergarten at Dewey Grade School.
He had flopped down on his tummy in front of the television in their apartment to watch a baseball game and was drawing stick figures. "Every figure exactly articulated the movements of the ballplayers in the game," she said.
"We always encouraged him, never said something was not a good way to make a living," she said.
Later, the family moved to Kingsbury Place in the Central West End; then, when he was 6, the family moved to Palo Alto, Calif.
In a recent interview at the Toronto Film Festival, Hickenlooper said he had been motivated by social justice all his life and had a "very political childhood." He said that he had accompanied his mother, whom he described as a "huge anti-war activist," to events where he met Black Panthers, activist and folk singer Joan Baez and Jane Fonda. United Farm Workers Union leader Cesar Chavez had dinner with him at his house.
At 13, he returned to St. Louis. He went to St. Louis U. High, a school he proudly mentioned at most public appearances.
Almost a Cartoonist
His childhood and high school pals saw George as "remarkably gifted artist, especially in drawing caricatures and cartoons," said Daniel Hamilton, a SLUH grad who works for the U.S. Department of State in Montreal.
At school, Hickenlooper told his pals about a "truly hilarious offbeat guy" on NBC daytime TV. "He drew a cartoon likeness of the guy," Hamilton said. When he was in New York, Hickenlooper "managed to wander around NBC headquarters, found the guy, gave him the sketch," Hamilton said. "(George) told him 'You are going to be a huge success.' The guy, David Letterman, told him 'You, my friend, are crazy'."
His cartoon of Martie Aboussie as a cigar-chomping ward boss in 1976, which he drew the summer Hickenlooper volunteered in Judge Thomas Grady's election campaign, made the rounds. "Martie loved it and displayed it in his headquarters," Grady said.
Hickenlooper visited the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to talk with the patient political cartoonist Tom Engelhardt about a career in cartooning. Hickenlooper left encouraged and fired up. But the 8 mm camera the senior Hickenlooper gave his son provided a new outlet for his creativity. With much encouragement from SLUH drama teacher Joe Schulte, he began making films.
"Even then, he was always trying to find the perfect -- the perfect way of doing things," said Schulte. "He got so excited about finding exactly the right (look) in a bus stop at Hanley and Manchester for a movie he was making."
Schulte continued to mentor Hickenlooper, often visiting him on the set. On those visits and in conversation with actors he said he saw their respect for Hickenlooper.
"He was an actor's director," Schulte said. "He really wanted to help actors and had warm relationships with them. He had certain magnetism. Actors were drawn to him."
By the time he left high school, his short 8 mm films had been seen several time on a KETC-Channel 9 program for adult St. Louis filmmakers and won two awards -- the Fountain Valley, Colorado National Film Festival first-place award for "Telefission," and the Young Filmaker's Festival at Forest Park award for "A Day in the Life," a film about a Vietnam veteran.
As high school was ending, he said he was eager to get on with his dream of professional film making and was accepted at UCLA film school. However, he spent the next four years at Yale University and the following two decades stressing the importance of a solid liberal arts education.
At Yale, movie making sometimes overtook his course work and nearly got him kicked out. As friends tell the story: He made one movie in a beautiful historic campus building that seemed to him to always be empty. Without asking permission to use the building, he found a way for his cast to sneak in through heating pipes tunnel. They shot for several days until, one evening they returned to the tunnel and lifted a large heating grate and climbed into a particularly beautiful room. Dressed for a climactic scene bearing (unloaded) guns they found an elegant fundraising dinner honoring for Sen. John Glenn, then running for president.
The Secret Service rounded up the gun-toting intruders and jailed them. Hickenlooper managed to explain his way out of jail and back into Yale's good graces.
The August after his graduation he married Yale classmate Suzanne Di Mello, a native of India. The couple moved to LA.
He tried to get interviews at Universal Studios. One day after he was tossed out there, he took a bus cross town to the Zoetrope Studios, his mother said. Seeing no receptionist, he called out "Hello, hello" until finally a voice several offices back called, "I'm here."
Hickenlooper followed the voice down a hallway and found a sweaty man, stripped to the waist surrounded by a shambles of cans with 60 hours of films and photo stills. These were of the disaster-plagued production in the Philippines of "Apocalypse Now." The man was that movie's director, Francis Ford Coppola.
Hickenlooper introduced himself. Coppola invited the young man to lunch. Within a year Hickenlooper was completing direction of the award-winning movie "Hearts of Darkness" with co-director Fax Bahr.
Back to St. Louis
Over the years Hickenlooper tried many times to bring film crews to St. Louis to make movies and several times did.
"He wanted to do it more but sometimes could not get financing," said Joe Edwards, the "mayor of the Delmar Loop" and one of scores of friends Hickenlooper cast as an extra in a ballroom scene at St. Louis City Hall for "The Big Brass Ring."
Dan Hamilton and many of his SLUH classmates were also extras in the City Hall scene.
Hickenlooper's father was in a couple of his movies, with small speaking parts. His mentor Schulte was in two of his movies. His godfather Brent J. Williams was in four.
"He loved being surrounded by people he loved," Williams said.
Schulte said there were scores of St. Louisans whom Hickenlooper encouraged to join the movie industry and helped.
One was SLUH and Yale schoolmate Michael Beugg. Each was best man for the other at their respective weddings. In 1993, Beugg was working in the White House Office of Budget and Management when Hickenlooper offered him a job without pay. Beugg is best know as producer of "Up in the Air," the George Clooney hit filmed here.
"I'm eternally grateful to George who got me to co-produce 'Some Folks call it Sling Blade' for him," Beugg said. "George told me that if I moved to LA and worked with him on that short -- he couldn't pay me -- but that I would learn the craft of producing and start in the industry at the top rather than at the bottom." Otherwise he likely would have had to start as a producing assistant.
"As usual George was right; I've been producer ever since." Beugg said.
Family
He loved being a dad.
"Every time I talked to George he was always telling me about the next activity he had planned with his son, Charles," Beugg said Monday night.
Father and son liked to bat baseballs in batting cages.
Hickenlooper was a long-time baseball fan. He and Beugg saw at least 50 Cardinal baseball games together in high school and continued to go to games together in LA. Beugg last saw Hickenlooper when they went to Joe Torre's final game as Dodger manager.
Hickenlooper was working on getting financing to make "How to Make Love like an Englishman" here using many of the historic buildings, Beugg said. "Pierce Brosnan was to star," said Beugg.
Hickenlooper's parents said in recent weeks he was very content that "Casino Jack" was going to be his break-through from respected, small independent movie maker to major movies.
"Casino Jack's" critical success may have helped him achieve his goal of reaching a level where he did not have to be constantly in LA so he might live anywhere in the world, his father said.
He hoped to move back to St. Louis, in part so his son, Charles, now 9, might attend St. Louis U. High, his father said. He liked St. Louis' values and its unpretentious intellectual life.
A few years ago, he attended a buffet dinner at the home of family friends Sarah and Edward Fehlig before guests walked to the Union Avenue Opera.
"George found it so refreshing that in the discussion about the opera, people had insight, depth and were not promoting themselves, no self-aggrandizement, the way he found in LA."
"He always had to promote himself there, too," said his stepmother, Jane T. Hickenlooper.
A few weeks ago Hickenlooper emailed SLUH teacher Schulte and invited him to sit beside him at the St. Louis premiere of "Casino Jack" on Nov. 12 at the Tivoli.
Schulte will be there eager to see what Hickenlooper has to teach his audience this time.
"Most of all George was trying to say 'stop, look and listen and be serious, the world around you is a serious place,' " Schulte said Monday night.
"George was trying to teach you something in his films. His movies were not just dessert. He wanted to make movies that would make us think."
Later this week about 40 family members and close friends have been invited to a funeral Mass in LA. Beugg is helping organize an industry memorial event at the Directors Guild before the year's end, Beugg said Monday evening from Los Angeles. Hickenlooper served on the independent directors committee at the guild.
"George directed 15 commercial films and documentaries, not counting all those television programs and advertisements. The average member of the Directors' Guild directs maybe one or two in his career. Directing is a hard field. Most directors get just one or two chances to direct a movie, then spend years searching for additional opportunities. George worked consistently for more than 20 years."
Patricia Rice is a freelance journalist.