Richard Elfman was born on March 6,1949 and is an American actor, musician, director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author and magazine publisher.
20 Facts About Richard Elfman
2.
Richard Elfman was born in the Watts district of inner-city Los Angeles.
3.
When Richard was four, his family moved to the Crenshaw district, where Elfman excelled as a track champion at Dorsey High School, subsequently becoming an amateur middleweight boxer.
4.
At that time, Richard Elfman performed and recorded as an Afro-Latin percussionist and wrote, performed and directed with the San Francisco musical theater group the Cockettes.
5.
Richard Elfman moved to Paris in the early 1970s to perform in theater as well as to record music in London.
6.
Richard Elfman performed at London's Roundhouse under the auspices of Savary's mentor, Peter Brook of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
7.
Shortly after his stint with the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Richard Elfman acted in and directed a stage production of Igor Stravinskys L'Histoire du soldat, which won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Production.
8.
In 2018 Richard wrote and directed an absurdist musical comedy in Los Angeles, Dead Man's Boner, co-starring his wife Anastasia Elfman.
9.
In 1972, Richard Elfman returned to Los Angeles and formed his own troupe, the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, where he served as its creative director and percussionist.
10.
Richard Elfman retrospectively described the Mystic Knights as a "commedia dell'arte ensemble", featuring upwards of fifteen musicians playing as many as thirty instruments, performing only recreated pieces of music from the 1920s through the 1940s as well as avant-garde originals composed by Richard Elfman's brother Danny.
11.
Richard Elfman left the Mystic Knights in 1979 to pursue a career in filmmaking, after which Danny assumed creative control of the band, eventually shortening the name to "Oingo Boingo" and transforming it into an 8-piece rock band, which found success throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
12.
Richard Elfman plays Afro-Latin percussion in the band Mambo Diabolico, originally created for a play of Richard Elfman's with collaborator Ego Plum.
13.
Richard Elfman's first directing project was the cult musical film Forbidden Zone, which was shot over a period of three years and released in 1982.
14.
The film itself was a surreal black and white film version of the Mystic Knights' theatrical show starring its band members and friends; notably, Danny Elfman appears onscreen as Satan, singing a modified version of Cab Calloways "Minnie the Moocher", while Richard appears, singing the 1920s song "The Yiddishe Charleston".
15.
In March 2010, Richard Elfman premiered a colorized version of Forbidden Zone at New York's Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with a Tim Burton exhibition, while a stage musical adaptation, Forbidden Zone: Live in the 6th Dimension, ran at the Sacred Fools Theater Company in Los Angeles from May to June 2010.
16.
Facilities allowing, Richard Elfman, an accomplished grill-master, throws a barbecue after the show.
17.
Richard Elfman sometimes participates by playing characters in these live performances.
18.
Richard Elfman opens the Forbidden Zone shadow cast shows with Erin Holt singing "Princess Polly" live in front of her screened "monster" image on stage.
19.
Richard Elfman has been a published journalist for 30 years, focusing on food, wine, travel and entertainment.
20.
Between 2010 and 2015, Richard Elfman produced 275 Buzzine red carpet, music and celebrity video interviews, as well as developed the web series Buzzine Celebrity House.