IVAN REITMAN
(27 October 1946 – 12 February 2022)
The Czechoslovakian-born Canadian director, producer and screenwriter Ivan Reitman, who has died from natural causes at the age of 75, had a flare for creating popular comedies such as Meatballs, Stripes, Kindergarten Cop, Dave and Junior. However, his greatest hits would undoubtedly be the Ghostbusters films. He also produced other comedies, including National Lampoon's Animal House, Beethoven and Space Jam.
He was born in Komarno in Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic) to Jewish parents, father Ladislav, who worked for the Czech Resistance movement, and mother Klara, an Auschwitz survivor. In 1950 the family moved to Canada and Ivan was educated there at Toronto's McMaster University where he studied music and began to make short television films. His first work was as a TV producer and then he became a theatre producer. Finally, he took up making films in the late 1970s by working on David Cronenberg's Shivers and Rabid.
His first big box-office hit was National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978, a college comedy with John Belushi, Donald Sutherland, Tom Hulce and Kevin Bacon. This was based on an off-Broadway show and used many of the comics from TV’s Saturday Night Live. Reitman worked with a repertory of regulars such as Bill Murray, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, directing or producing such films as Stripes (1981), Heavy Metal (1981), Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) and ultimately Ghostbusters (1984), the mega-hit which surprisingly found a huge audience willing to succumb to its outrageous silliness. It took in excess of $300 million at the box-office and gave rise to sequels and a TV cartoon series.
It is difficult to separate the producer Reitman from the director and occasional writer, as each job resulted in a body of comedic work second to none in Hollywood. With his irreverent cast of comic actors and writers, coupled with his own sense of humour and an unstinting knowledge of what would work and what wouldn't, he was really the uncrowned king of movie comedy. After the success of Ghostbusters, Reitman directed Robert Redford and Debra Winger in Legal Eagles, ostensibly a comedy but also a courtroom drama with a thriller aspect, as well as some special effects that didn't help it to become much of a hit. Twins (1988) with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito fared better, as did Kindergarten Cop (1990), again with Schwarzenegger.
With Dave (1993) the emphasis was on satire rather than straight comedy in a story about the US security services hiring a look-alike stand-in for the president. It was a very shrewd piece with Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver on top form and a sharply amusing screenplay by Gary Ross who was nominated for an Academy Award. Junior (1994) reunited Arnie and Danny with Schwarzenegger playing a pregnant man and DeVito his fellow scientist who inserts a fertilized egg into Arnie's body...
Reitman continued to direct films until 2021 while also acting more as a producer on such titles as Big Shots, Feds, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Beethoven (two films and a TV series), The Late Shift, Road Trip, Killing Me Softly and Hotel for Dogs, among many others. Up in the Air (2009) with George Clooney and Vera Farmiga was particularly good. It was directed by Reitman's son Jason who has followed his father into the film business as a director, producer and writer. It received Academy Award and Bafta nominations for best picture. However, Hitchcock (2012), which detailed the film director working on Psycho, one of his biggest successes, was not a commercial hit, despite reasonable reviews and with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Helen Mirren as Hitchcock's wife Alma.
Ivan Reitman also co-produced the remake of Ghostbusters in 2016 while Jason directed the fourth film in the series, Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), produced by Ivan and featuring members of the original cast. It was a popular hit grossing nearly $200 million at the box-office. This was no doubt due to the fact that if you give the audience the same dish over again they will lap it up... and they did. It was Ivan Reitman's final film project as a producer. However, with Jason Reitman at the helm maybe the Ghostbusters history doesn't end there. Two more TV series have been announced although nothing has happened hitherto.
Ivan Reitman was married to Genevieve Robert and, apart from their son Jason, they have two daughters, Caroline and Catherine, who are both actresses.
MICHAEL DARVELL