Joe Dante

• Date of Birth:

  28 November 1946 Morristown, New Jersey, USA

Joseph Dante Jr. was born on November 28, 1946 in Morristown, New Jersey, and raised in the nearby borough of Parsippany. His father was a professional golf players and his father wrote some books on the instructions of playing golf some of which included Four Magic Moves to Winning Golf, and Stop that Slice. After a bout with polio that nearly crippled him at age 7, he slowly recovered and decided to take up drawing rather than athletics as his parents did.Dante studied at the Philadelphia College of Ar... more

Joseph Dante Jr. was born on November 28, 1946 in Morristown, New Jersey, and raised in the nearby borough of Parsippany. His father was a professional golf players and his father wrote some books on the instructions of playing golf some of which included Four Magic Moves to Winning Golf, and Stop that Slice. After a bout with polio that nearly crippled him at age 7, he slowly recovered and decided to take up drawing rather than athletics as his parents did.Dante studied at the Philadelphia College of Art after graduating from high school. As a teenager, he contributed to Castle of Frankenstein and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines with various writings, and upon graduation from the Philadelphia College of Art, he became a film critic for the Film Bulletin newspaper for which he later became the managing editor. With a friend, named Jon Davison, Dante cut together a series of movie clips and film trailers and edited them into a 7-hour long , The Movie Orgy (1968) which was shown on college campuses.In 1974, Jon Davison was the head of advertising for Roger Corman's New World Productions and persuaded Dante to move to California to work for them as an editor for various movie trailers and films. In 1976, Roger Corman allowed Dante, to direct his very first feature film with New World staffer Allan Arkush which was titled Hollywood Boulevard (1976), a low-budget feature filmed in just 10 days on a $50,000 budget, in which Dante and Arkush inserted stock footage from other Corman-produced films. Hoping to get the jump (Note: Piranha came out 3 years after Jaws!) on the success of the Steven Spielberg film Jaws, Corman commissioned Dante to direct Piranha (1978) around the same time Jaws II was being made. Working with a budget of $660,000 and with a script by John Sayles, Dante had his first serious problems with the filming which included last-minute cast changes, underwater cameras that kept breaking down, union woes, and unusable second unit footage. But the finished film was a miracle of low-budget exploitation filmmaking and has become a cult favorite.Dante co-wrote the story for Rock and Roll High School (1979), and was then directed The Howling (1981). With another script by John Sayles and with a budget of over $1 million, the movie about California werewolves proved to be another box-office hit, highlighted by state-of-the-art special effects by Rob Bottin. After directing two out of six episodes for the short-lived comic TV series "Police Squad! (1982), Dante found himself working alongside Steven Spielberg, John Landis and Australian director George Miller for the anthology movie The Twilight Zone, The Movie (1983) in which Dante directed the third segment, a remake of a 1961 original Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", which allowed him to draw the script from his love of cartoons which played a major part in the segment.Steven Spielberg then hired him to work as director for the Chris Columbus script of Gremlins (1984) which was another box-office success. Dante then directed Explorers (1985) which starred Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as suburban kids seeking alien life. But the Paramount distributors rushed the film before Dante was finished editing it and the studio's lackluster effort to advertise it led him to become disillusioned with the movie industry.He directed some episodes for the Sci-Fi series "Amazing Stories" before directing his next Science Fiction feature which was Innerspace (1987) a take on the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, which, whilst critically well reviewed, was another box office failure.After directing five episodes of "Eerie, Indiana", a tv series on which he also served as creative consultant, Dante returned to the big-screen with the well-received Matinee (1993), an affectionate period satire set in 1962 against the background of the Cold War and starring John Goodman as a film director, inspired by gimmick filmmaker William Castle. Dante spent the next several years working for television and re-making several movies such as Runaway Daughters (1994) and directed a satire on politics with The Second Civil War (1997) for which he was nominated for a Cable ACE award.Dante's next two films, Small Soldiers (1998), and Looney Toons: Back in Action (2004) garnered good reviews but were not commercial hits. He was recruited by Mick Garris to direct two episodes of the anthology series "Masters of Horror" (2005 and 2006): "Homecoming" a biting political satire and the first American film to deal with the Iraq War.His latest film The Hole 3D premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival and won its inaugural Best 3D Film Award.