Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood,’ ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ director, dies at 94

Ted Kotcheff, a globe-trotting Canadian film director who also roamed across genres including the Rambo debut “First Blood” and cult favorites “Weekend at Bernie’s” and the Australian outback thriller “Wake in Fright,” died April 10 at his home in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico. He was 94.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Kate Kotcheff, but no cause was given.

Kotcheff’s more than six-decade career took him to London to work on television dramas as a young director who felt stifled in Toronto, and then to the Australian bush while he was blocked from the United States for alleged anti-American associations.

He eventually reached Hollywood to work with stars such as George Segal and Jane Fonda in the crime farce “Fun with Dick and Jane” (1977) and Nick Nolte in the football satire “North Dallas Forty” (1979).

Yet the project Kotcheff cited with special pride was “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” a 1974 coming-of-age drama starring Richard Dreyfuss in a film that became widely regarded as helping put Canada on the cinema map.

Kotcheff said he found a Hollywood producer interested in the script, which was based on a 1959 eponymous novel by his London collaborator and former housemate, Mordecai Richler. The story, set in Montreal, follows the overheated ambitions and moral compromises of a young man from a working-class Jewish family.

Kotcheff had already directed a television adaptation for “Armchair Theatre” in 1961 on Britain’s ITV network.

This time, the Hollywood producer suggested changes. “Why not move it to Pittsburgh?” Kotcheff told the University of Toronto Magazine in 2013. “And maybe we could make Duddy a Greek boy.”

“It was my friend’s book,” he continued. “I couldn’t do that to him. Duddy, a Greek boy? In Pittsburgh?”

Kotcheff cobbled together enough funding for a low-budget shoot in Montreal, and the film found a home in art cinemas and festivals – winning the top prize in Berlin in 1974. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote that “Duddy” stood apart “from the usual literature about unscrupulous ambition, most of which is pious and dull and goes without saying. There’s not a bad performance in the film.”

“‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’ is the axis on which my career and, in many ways, my life, has rotated,” Kotcheff wrote in his 2017 autobiography, “Director’s Cut: My Life in Film,” co-authored by journalist Josh Young.

Kotcheff headed to London in 1957 seeking a bigger creative arena than the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he had landed his first job after college. He moved into British television for “ITV Playhouse” and other shows, working on teleplays that included adaptations of Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones” (1958) and Jean Cocteau’s “La Voix Humaine,” or “The Human Voice,” in 1966, starring Ingrid Bergman.

During a live “Armchair Theatre” broadcast of the nuclear bomb drama “Underground” in 1958, a lead actor, Gareth Jones, died of a heart attack. Kotcheff and the rest of the cast finished the show, improvising around Jones’s lines.

Kotcheff’s cinema debut came in 1962 with the comedy “Tiara Tahiti,” starring James Mason and John Mills (filmed in Tahiti), and he followed with other films in the 1960s including the racial drama “Two Gentlemen Sharing” (1969), which was shot in London.

The door to the United States was still closed. During the anti-Communist “Red Scare” in the early 1950s, Kotcheff was turned back at the border in Vermont, accused of being part of a leftist book club in Canada. Then in 1968, a musician burned an American flag at an event in London’s Royal Albert Hall, where Kotcheff was part of the production team. That put him on another U.S. no-entry list, he said.

“First a communist and now a flag burner!” he wrote in his memoir.

An offer came from Australia to direct “Wake in Fright,” a 1971 psychological boiler about a schoolteacher (Gary Bond) who becomes stranded in a mining camp and falls under the grip of hard-drinking locals who force him to take part in a sadistic kangaroo hunt. The film received a cool reception in Australia over the unflattering portrayal of outback life.

The movie later was hailed as a landmark moment in Australia’s new wave cinema that included director Peter Weir’s 1975 drama “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” (Kotcheff allowed Weir to shadow him on the “Wake in Fright” set.)

“Wake in Fright” was rarely seen for decades after the distributor went bankrupt. A screening at the Toronto Film Festival was arranged in 2009, marking its return. “Powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert in 2012. “It comes billed as a ‘horror film’ and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic.”

Kotcheff was cleared to enter the United States in the early 1970s and found Hollywood studios eager to make offers. He made a niche in wry comedies such as “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” (1978). Meanwhile, he and Michael Kozoll (co-writer of the NBC police series “Hill Street Blues”) crafted a script based on a 1972 book, “First Blood,” by Canadian-born writer David Morrell.

After several actors turned down the lead role, Kotcheff said he suggested Stallone, star of the “Rocky” franchise, to play the Vietnam veteran John Rambo, who stalks a small-town sheriff (Brian Dennehy) and his deputes after being abused and humiliated.

“First Blood” was a box office hit in 1982 and led to four movies with the Rambo character. Kotcheff turned down a chance to be part of them.

“They offered me the first sequel, and after I read the script I said, ‘In the first film, he doesn’t kill anybody. In this film, he kills 75 people,’” Kotcheff told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. “It seemed to be celebrating the Vietnam War, which I thought was one of the stupidest wars in history.”

In the late 1980s, Kotcheff heard about an off-the-wall story in the works by scriptwriter Robert Klane. It became “Weekend at Bernie’s” (1989), a romp about two salesmen (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who try to keep up a ruse that their dead boss (Terry Kiser) is still alive and well and enjoying the fun at his beach house in the Hamptons. (Kotcheff makes a cameo as father of one of the young men.)

Some critics called the movie a one-joke slog. But fans embraced the freewheeling insanity, giving the film a place among ’80s wisecracking comedies including “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986).

Kotcheff said he passed on working on “Bernie’s” sequel. He quipped that he had run out of dead-guy gags.

William Theodore Kotcheff was born in Toronto on April 7, 1931. His parents worked various jobs and sold homemade moonshine during the Depression. Kotcheff said his father changed the spelling of his last name from Tsochev after arriving in Canada from Bulgaria.

As a child, Kotcheff watched from backstage while his parents and friends put on plays in Bulgarian. “They’d write their own scripts. Often the actors, working other jobs, didn’t have time to learn the lines,” he recalled.

He received a degree in English literature from Toronto University in 1952 and joined the state broadcaster as a stagehand, rising to become a director.

His other films included the Western “Billy Two Hats” (1974), starring Gregory Peck and Desi Arnaz Jr.; the POW drama “Uncommon Valor” (1983), starring Gene Hackman, and “Joshua Then and Now” (1985), a Gatsby-style tale based on a novel by Richler.

Kotcheff joined the NBC crime series “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” as executive producer in 2000 and remained for more than a decade.

His marriage to Sylvia Kay ended in divorce. He then married Laifun Chung and had two children together. Other survivors include three children from his first marriage; four grandchildren; and a brother.

The original script for “First Blood” ended with Rambo’s suicide. During a test screening, the audience hated that conclusion, Kotcheff said in an interview with the Directors Guild of America.

Weeks earlier, he and Stallone had privately worked out a rewrite with Rambo surviving – which unintentionally opened the way for sequels.

“I said, ‘Well, boys,’” Kotcheff recalled, “‘I just happen to have this other ending here in my back pocket.’”