George Armitage, director of 90s indie hits Grosse Pointe Blank and Miami Blues, as well as Hit Man, the 70s blaxploitation remake of Get Carter, has died aged 82. Variety reported he died on 15 February in Playa del Rey in California.
Armitage started out in TV, working on the celebrated TV soap opera Peyton Place, then broke into features via Roger Corman’s micro-budget studio New World in the late 1960s. He subsequently specialised in crime films: Grosse Pointe Blank, which starred John Cusack and Minnie Driver, was his biggest commercial hit, and his final directorial credit was the Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce in 2004.
Born in Connecticut in 1942, Armitage moved to California with his family in 1956, and got a job in the mailroom at 20th Century Fox. He quickly moved into production, and became an associate producer on Peyton Place in 1967. He was keen, however, to work on something more cutting edge, and after getting to know Corman was assigned a project with the concept: “Everybody over thirty died.” Armitage wrote the script that became Corman’s 1970 post-apocalyptic satire Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.
Corman then gave him sexploitation thriller Private Duty Nurses to direct, and a year later he was asked to write and direct Hit Man, which Armitage said later he wasn’t initially told was a reworking of the Michael Caine thriller. Armitage also said he was reluctant to make the film as a black director would have done it better, but agreed to direct it after Corman felt the leading actor, Bernie Casey, was too inexperienced to take the job on.
In 1976 Armitage wrote and directed action thriller Vigilante Force for Corman; it was about a group of mercenaries who take over a small town, and starred Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent. Aside from the 1979 TV movie Hot Rod, inspired by his teenage experiences in California, Armitage concentrated on writing for the next decade; his next opportunity to direct came via his former Corman compadre Jonathan Demme, who passed the Charles Willeford adaptation Miami Blues to him. Starring Alec Baldwin, Fred Ward and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miami Blues was an indie hit and led to John Cusack, who had optioned Grosse Pointe Blank from writer Tom Jankiewicz, asking Armitage to direct.
Released in 1997, Grosse Pointe Blank starred Cusack as a psychologically troubled hitman who returns to his hometown and attends his high school reunion; Armitage later said he insisted on cutting the script, which Cusack and his collaborators Steve Pink and DV DeVincentis had rewritten, down to 100 pages, but his improvisatory directing style allowed the cast to restore much of it. Armitage followed it up with The Big Bounce, which starred Owen Wilson and Sara Foster; he said he was disappointed with the result after cuts were made in postproduction – as was Leonard, who called it the worst movie ever made. The Big Bounce was Armitage’s final credit; he subsequently acted as an uncredited mentor and script doctor on other people’s projects.
Armitage is survived by his son Brent Armitage, also a film-maker.
