Jack Hill (Director/Writer)

Jack Hill grew up around movies - his father was a designer for the Disney studios and Warner Brothers. He went to the University of California to study film, where he was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola - they worked together on student productions and later both apprenticed with Roger Corman, working on Terror, The (1963). While Coppola went on to Oscardom, Jack continued with B-flicks. He didn't make a lot of films, and while all were low budget they all (except Switchblade Sisters (1975)) made money, and his early 'blaxploitaton' films Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) were hits. Soon after Switchblade Sisters (1975) he stopped making movies so he and his wife Elke could pursue meditation and he could write novels. Today his films are hailed as cult classics, thanks primarily to Quentin Tarantino, who saw Hill's work as it made its way to video. With retrospectives and a re-release of Switchblade Sisters (1975), his career seems to be reviving.