Portal:Horror/Selected biography archive/February 2008

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Stuart Gordon (born August 11, 1947) in Chicago, Illinois) is a director, writer and producer of films and plays. Most of Gordon's film work is in the horror genre, though he has also ventured into science fiction. Like his friend and fellow filmmaker Brian Yuzna, Gordon is a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft and has adapted several Lovecraft stories for the screen. They include Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak (from "The Outsider"), and Dagon, as well as the Masters of Horror episode "Dreams in the Witch-House."

Gordon attended the University of Wisconsin and soon after formed Screw Theater. In March 1968 Gordon's Screw Theater produced The Game Show at the UW Memorial Union. The goal of the production was to get the audience to leave. To that end the heat was turned to 90, ushers chained the doors behind the audience, the show's start time delayed and the content of The Game Show made as inane as possible. The audience finally demanded to leave one hour and fifty minutes into the two hour production. In the fall of 1968, he produced a version of Peter Pan that got him and his future wife arrested for obscenity. The story made national headlines until the charges were dropped in November 1968. As Gordon described it in a 2001 interview:

"I had been protesting against the war in Viet Nam, and got tear-gassed by the Chicago police, and it suddenly struck me that you could take Peter Pan and turn it into a political cartoon about the whole situation. So, Peter Pan became the leader of the hippies and yippies, Captain Hook became Mayor Daley, and the pirates became the Chicago police. We left all of the James Barrie dialogue intact, so when they all went off to Neverland they sprinkled pixie dust on themselves and think lovely thoughts, and up they go. That was an acid trip, which was visualized by a psychedelic light show that was projected onto the bodies of seven naked young ladies..." [1]

After the University of Wisconsin demanded future theatrical productions by Screw Theater be overseen by a University Professor, Gordon cut his University ties to form Broom Street Theater. Its first production, the new translation of Lysistrata, premiered in May of 1969. Gordon is married to Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, whom he frequently casts in his movies. Together in 1970, they founded the Chicago Organic Theater Company, for which Gordon also served as artistic director. With the company, he did several plays, such as Warp!, Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Bleacher Bums, ER, Bloody Bess. Warp! was later adapted into a comic book by First Comics. (more...)