LANDIS, JOHN

LANDIS, JOHN (1950– ), U.S. writer-director. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Landis grew up in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, and began working in the mailroom of Twentieth Century Fox as a teenager. In Europe he worked as a production   assistant on Kelly's Heroes (1970) and as a stuntman for a few spaghetti Westerns. At 21 he began work on his first film, Schlock (1973), a horror-genre parody. Landis then directed Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), a comedy. But it was Landis' next film, National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), that became one of the most famous and successful comedies of all time, spurring a collaboration with actor John Belushi that continued in his next comedy project, The Blues Brothers (1980). Landis mixed comedy and horror in An American Werewolf in London (1981) and found success with both the Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd comedy Trading Places (1983) and the Michael Jackson video Thriller. However, Landis' career was tainted by a July 23, 1982, accident on the set of Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), which took the lives of actor Vic Morrow and child actors Renee Chen and My-Ca Le. His subsequent films Into the Night (1985), Spies Like Us (1985), Three Amigos (1986), and Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) were poorly received. Despite the success of the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America (1988), Landis found it difficult to recapture acclaim with such projects as Oscar (1991), Innocent Blood (1992), The Stupids (1996), and Blues Brothers 2000 (1996), or as executive producer of television shows such as Sliders (1995), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show (1997), and The Lost World (1998). Landis also contributed to the 2005 Showtime cable series Masters of Horror with the episode "Deer Women." -BIBLIOGRAPHY: "Landis, John," in: International Directory of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors (2004); "Landis, John," in: Contemporary Authors (Gale, 2004); John Landis – IMDB, at: www.imdb.com/name/nm0000484. (Adam Wills (2nd ed.)