Jack Hill

Writer · Cast · Director

Born

January 28, 1933 · Los Angeles, California, USA

Jack Hill, sometimes referred to as a legendary cult film director, grew up around films - his father was a set designer for Warner Bros. since 1925 and later for Walt Disney Studios, where he eventually designed Disneyland's Cinderella's Castle. Jack 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 The Terror (1963), among other films. While Coppola went on to Oscardom, Jack continued with low budget exploitation films, several of which were highly profitable, especially The Big Doll House (1971), which started the short-lived women-in-prison film genre. His so-called "blaxploitaton" films, Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), were both major hit films. Nowadays his films are hailed as cult classics, thanks primarily to Quentin Tarantino who saw Jack's work as it made its way to video, with almost all of his films now available for viewing on various streaming channels, as well as on DVD releases.