Posted on 03/18/2002 10:56:54 AM PST by JennysCool
PIONEER, Calif. (AP) - William Witney, an influential director of dozens of Westerns, movie serials and TV shows, has died. He was 86.
Witney died Sunday at a nursing facility near his home here in the Sierra Nevada foothills from complications following a series of strokes, according to friend Dave Holland.
During a 40-year career, Witney worked on two dozen serials, including the popular Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy and Captain Marvel shows. He directed more than 60 feature films, many of them 1940s and 1950s B-Westerns, along with hundreds of episodes of TV shows such as "Lassie," "Wagon Train" and "Bonanza."
He also came up with the idea to choreograph screen fights. His last movie was "Darktown Strutters" in 1975.
"I've found directors I like, but William Witney is ahead of them all," director Quentin Tarantino told the New York Times in 2000. "I think it's so cool that he began as the king of cowboy serials and ended with a black exploitation film. That's a career, man."
"The camera movements are elegant," Tarantino said. "You have to have made movies for 30 years to be able to move the camera so unpretentiously."
Born in 1915 in Lawton, Okla., Witney broke into the movie business in 1933 as a messenger boy and four years later became a director at the ripe age of 21. He was pressed into service on a Republic Pictures serial after the director was fired.
Asked the secret of making Westerns, he once replied: "Make sure you have good headlights on your car. Because you go to work in the dark and you come home in the dark."
Witney often told the tale that he got the idea to choreograph film fights after watching Busby Berkeley filming a dance number one step at a time.
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