John Frederick Milius is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer.
68 Facts About John Milius
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John Milius was a writer for the first two Dirty Harry films, received an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, and wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian, and Red Dawn.
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John Milius later served as the co-creator of the Primetime Emmy Award-winning television series Rome.
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When Milius was seven, his father sold Milius Shoe Company, which his grandfather George W Milius had founded in 1923, and retired.
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John Milius says he attempted to join the Marine Corps and volunteer for Vietnam War service in the late 1960s, but was rejected due to a "chronic" and "sometimes disabling" case of mild asthma.
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At one stage John Milius considered becoming an artist or historian.
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John Milius studied film at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, which he chose because it was an elitist school that trained people for Hollywood.
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John Milius's classmates included George Lucas, Basil Poledouris, Randal Kleiser and Donald F Glut.
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John Milius says he was influenced by his teacher, Irwin Blacker:.
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John Milius gave you the screenplay form, which I hated so much, and if you made one mistake on the form, you flunked the class.
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John Milius's attitude was that the least you can learn is the form.
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John Milius says his writing style was influenced by two novels in particular, Moby-Dick and On the Road:.
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John Milius wrote a documentary, The Emperor, directed by classmate George Lucas, who edited an animated short Milius directed called Marcello, I'm So Bored with John Strawbridge.
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John Milius followed this with The Last Resort which was optioned by Michael S Laughlin in 1969.
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John Milius then got a summer job working at the story department of American International Pictures through a student colleague of his who had begun working there, Willard Huyck.
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Huyck and John Milius worked at AIP under producer Larry Gordon, reading scripts.
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John Milius's name had been mentioned in a 1968 Time magazine article about the new generation of Hollywood filmmakers, which referred to George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.
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John Milius wrote an original called Truck Driver which was purchased by Levy-Garner-Laven, although that film too was not made.
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John Milius was called back to work on it, and his fee grew each time.
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George Hamilton hired John Milius to rewrite Evel Knievel, a biopic of the stunt rider, at a fee of $1,000 a day.
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John Milius wrote an original script, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, about the famous judge.
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John Milius offered it for $150,000 if he could direct, but could find no takers.
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John Milius sold it to First Artists for $300,000, then extremely high for a script.
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John Milius did some work with David Giler on the script which became The Black Bird.
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John Milius was the inspiration for the character of Big John in the enormously successful American Graffiti.
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John Milius wrote the first draft of the Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force.
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John Milius worked on the script for a TV sequel, Melvin Purvis: G-Man, a pilot for a proposed series about Melvin Purvis, but did not like the director, Dan Curtis, or the experience of working for TV.
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In 1974, David Picker announced he would produce Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail directed by John Milius and written by Winfred Blevins, about Theodore Roosevelt.
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John Milius next wrote and directed the popular adventure film The Wind and the Lion, which starred Sean Connery and Candice Bergen.
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John Milius later said he felt this was his first "real" movie.
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John Milius intended to follow this with Give Your Heart to the Hawks, a story about mountain man Jedediah Smith in the 1820s based a novel by Winfred Blevins "It's my interpretation of Jedediah Smith, which might not be exactly historical", said Milius.
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John Milius did come close to making Extreme Prejudice, based on his script, in 1976.
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In 1975, John Milius formed his own production company, The A Team, with Buzz Feitshans, who had edited Dillinger.
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Schrader once described John Milius's writing as containing too many good lines and scenes.
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John Milius says he was offered $17,000 to rewrite Skin Game but then Francis Ford Coppola made a competing offer of $15,000 for John Milius to write Apocalypse Now.
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Spielberg said in 1978 that John Milius was key to the group of young filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, which included himself, Lucas, and Coppola:.
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John Milius has more life than all the rest of us put together.
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John Milius enjoyed his greatest commercial success as a director with Conan the Barbarian, which made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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John Milius helped produce Uncommon Valor and acted as "spiritual adviser" for Lone Wolf McQuade.
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John Milius wrote and directed an episode for The New Twilight Zone and a story of his, "Viking Bikers from Hell", was used in an episode of Miami Vice.
41.
Connery thought the script was "too American" and insisted Neufeld hire John Milius to rewrite the Russian sequences.
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Neufeld then hired John Milius to write and direct Flight of the Intruder, based on the book by Stephen Coonts.
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In 1992, John Milius claimed that he was blacklisted for his conservative beliefs in liberal Hollywood, saying that his flops were not as forgiven as those from more leftist directors.
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John Milius worked on a number on unfilmed scripts, including Bad Iron, a biker movie written by Kent Anderson, which he intended to produce.
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John Milius was going to direct a film about Alexander the Great starring Jean-Claude Van Damme but that was put on hold when a miniseries on the same topic was made by Italian TV.
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John Milius hoped to direct the film, but could not raise the funding.
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John Milius was going to direct an adaptation of Tom Clancy's novel Without Remorse with Gary Sinise and Laurence Fishburne, but the project folded in 1995, two weeks before shooting was to commence due to the financial collapse of Savoy Pictures.
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John Milius directed two films for cable: Motorcycle Gang and Rough Riders.
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In 2000, John Milius was hired to work as a creative consultant with the Institute for Creative Technologies to pre-visualize the challenges to peace that America will face and the advanced virtual reality technologies necessary to train US troops for the future.
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John Milius developed Jornada del Muerto, a biker film starring Triple H and wrote a pilot for a TV show for UPN, Delta, about a military special ops team that takes on terrorists.
51.
Texas Rangers was eventually made, though John Milius stated that his script was substantially rewritten.
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John Milius suffered a major financial reversal in the late 1990s and early 2000s when his accountant embezzled from him an estimated $3 million.
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John Milius tried to get a job as a staff writer on the TV show Deadwood; showrunner David Milch was reluctant as he did not consider Milius a staff writer.
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John Milius pleaded that he needed the money in order to pay for his son's tuition at law school, so Milch simply paid the fees.
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John Milius wrote a script about the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War, The Chosin Few for Mark Cuban's 2929 Entertainment, and The Iron Horsemen, a motorcycle feature.
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In 2010 John Milius was working on a new project, a film biography of Genghis Khan, and a proposed TV series called Pharaoh, set during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, when he had a stroke.
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In March 2011, John Milius was a story consultant for the video game Homefront, about a North Korean conquest of America.
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John Milius has long claimed to be an outsider in Hollywood.
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John Milius made two films featuring Roosevelt: The Wind and the Lion and the made-for-TV film Rough Riders.
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The character of John Milner from the 1973 George Lucas film American Graffiti was inspired by Milius, who was a good friend of Lucas while they were at USC film school.
61.
The novella Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls by Aleksandar Hemon features an episode with John Milius, who is described as "sitting at a desk sucking on a cigar as long as a walking stick".
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John Milius was instrumental during the startup of the UFC organization: it was his idea to use the octagon-shaped cage, and his association with UFC helped provide interest and investors to the startup UFC.
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John Milius' stories reflect his own deeply held ethic, which embraces the values of tradition, adventure, spiritualism, honour and an intense loyalty to friends.
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John Milius plays the Hollywood game like a pro, yet sticks to his own rules; he is a romantic filmmaker who avoids love scenes; his movies contain violence, yet no death in them is without meaning.
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In 2007, John Milius was the recipient of the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award.
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John Milius was a passionate surfer for much of his life but gave it up when he turned fifty.
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John Milius is a self-proclaimed "Zen anarchist", but he publicly aligns himself with conservative factions in Hollywood and he was interviewed in the documentary Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood.
68.
John Milius has been consultant to a military think tank, the Institute for Creative Technologies.