1. Gene Curtis Harrington was an American film and television director whose work included experimental films and horror films.
17 Facts About Curtis Harrington
1. 2.
Curtis Harrington is considered one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema.
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Curtis Harrington attended Occidental College and the University of Southern California, then graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in film studies.
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Curtis Harrington began his career as a film critic, writing a book on Josef von Sternberg in 1948.
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Curtis Harrington directed several avant-garde short films in the 1940s and 1950s, including Fragment of Seeking, Picnic, and The Wormwood Star.
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Curtis Harrington worked with Kenneth Anger, serving as a cinematographer on Anger's Puce Moment and acting in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
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Curtis Harrington had links to Thelema shared with his close associates Kenneth Anger and Marjorie Cameron who frequently acted in his films.
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Curtis Harrington was the driving force in rediscovering the original James Whale version of The Old Dark House.
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Curtis Harrington was an advisor on Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, about the last days of director James Whale, and Curtis Harrington had known Whale at the end of his life.
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Curtis Harrington made two television movies based on screenplays by Robert Bloch: The Cat Creature and The Dead Don't Die.
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Curtis Harrington had a cameo in Orson Welles's unfinished The Other Side of the Wind.
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Curtis Harrington's final film, the short Usher, is a remake of Fall of the House of Usher, an unreleased film he did while in high school.
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Curtis Harrington cast Nikolas and Zeena Schreck in his updated version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".
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Financing of the film was partly accomplished through the Shrecks' brokering of the sale of Curtis Harrington's signed copy of Crowley's The Book of Thoth.
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The Academy Film Archive has preserved several of Curtis Harrington's films, including Night Tide, On the Edge, and Picnic.
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Curtis Harrington died on May 6,2007, aged 80, of complications from a stroke he suffered two years earlier.
17.
Curtis Harrington's remains are interred in the Cathedral Mausoleum at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.