Nestled just north of U.S. 20 in rural Galena Township sits a farm where the peace and tranquility of rural life is abundant. On this farm, you will find a man who has directed some of Hollywood’s biggest names. He is this week's La Porte County Life in the Spotlight.
Growing up in Chicago, John Hancock aspired to be a violinist.
“When I went away to school I got interested in the theater and started directing in college and immediately enjoyed doing it and got a lot of positive feedback,” Hancock said. “I then decided that is what I wanted to do.”
It turned out to be his best decision.
Recently, the 74-year-old director and his wife Dorothy Tristan wrapped up production of “Swan Song”, a movie produced by his La Porte-based production company FilmAcres scheduled for its theatrical release in 2014.
“We wanted to go for broke,” Hancock said of “Swan Song”. “If this is going to be our last picture, we wanted to have it be great. And to put it in everything that we felt and thought about being this age and the difficulty of passing on what you know and think to another generation. (The movie) is about a grandmother and a granddaughter who is very difficult and is addicted to her iPad and this little girl is in awful despair. It is a very personal, kind of autographical picture.”
The inspiration for the movie came after La Porte resident Jeff Puckett visited the Hancock farm.
“Puckett came over with a friend of his and they had some film they shot and they were asking for editing advice from me,” he said. “Then we got to thinking that if we were going to make a movie, I want it to be better than “Bang the Drum Slowly”. I want it to be the best movie we ever made. Let’s do something that really represents us. That is what we did. One thing led to another and the thing grew and we ended up with a huge crew and 41 shooting days.”
He credited his wife for her role in the making of “Swan Song”.
“Well it is wonderful to be married to someone who can write,” Hancock said. “The business is really all about material and for us to have our own cottage industry has been very good. She was brilliant. She and (Grace Tarnow) were brilliant in this. They are both fabulous. It is very strong at the center.”
Hancock sees a lot of potential in Tarnow, an eighth grader at Kesling Middle School.
“She can really act and also sing,” he said. “She is very subtle. She does it right intuitively. You don’t need to direct her very much. She brings it and what she intends to do and right and well. And in a different take, she will do it a little different and it is equally good. She is extraordinarily gifted. This girl is going to get picked up and is going to be big. And this is going to help publicize it.”
Hancock’s directorial career took off at age 22 on Broadway and followed that with the 1970 film “Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet”. The movie was financed by a grant through the American Film Institute and was nominated for a Short-Subject Live-Action Academy Award. CBS was so impressed with the film that it bought the movie and aired it during its Thanksgiving Day football game.
“The film was about businessmen playing football in Central Park,” Hancock said.
His big directorial break came in 1973 with “Bang the Drum Slowly”, based on a novel written in 1956 by Mark Harris. The financing for the movie came from a Chicago lawyer who read the book and also went to Chicago Cubs games while recovering from a heart attack.
“Maurice Rosenfield was a high pressure guy,” Hancock said. “He’d grown to love baseball. He wanted to make a film out of it. Then he saw the short and here is this talented young director that could do comedy and feeling and he thought I would be good. He tracked me down and called me up in New York."
“You get calls from people saying that they have the money, but they don’t,” he said. “I think it pays to follow up on them once in a while and this guy did. He put up the $1 million that we made the picture for and we sold it to Paramount and it opened up to some of the best reviews anyone has ever got. And that was very important in my career.”
The movie featured Michael Moriarity and a relative unknown at the time – Robert De Niro. The film launched De Niro’s career.
“One of the hard things about life is we’re at the mercy of random forces,” Hancock said. “Somebody asked De Niro what do you attribute your success. He said luck. And the interviewer said you don’t think it is hard work. De Niro once told me that there are more talented actors. But he said there will be no one that will work harder than I do. And that was my experience with him.”
Hancock also directed episodes of “Hill Street Blues” and “The Twilight Zone” (1985 CBS version).
“I like shooting episodic television because it is fast,” he said. “And I enjoy shooting it more than seeing the result because of the schedule; you can’t go for perfection on. It’s not perfect.”
But Hancock said there is one difference between movies and television.
“A director of a feature film, you are about as close as you can come to an absolute monarch,” Hancock said. “The studios fundamentally don’t bother you. They almost never tell you what to do. On a television show, you are a guest and it is their territory and it is their show. You are not in charge at all. If you want to change a line you have to call the executive producer. It’s much more fun to be the king.”
Hancock has high hopes for “Swan Song” and its potential to be good or even better than his 1989 Christmas movie “Prancer”. Like “Prancer”, almost all of “Swan Song” was shot in La Porte County.
“I like for them to remember us for this picture,” he said. “I think this is going to be really good. It was like it almost wasn’t acting. It was personal and we improvised a lot. And she just came up with some great things. (Dorothy) and Grace bonded so thoroughly and lovingly and they trusted each other enough that they could get mad at each other on camera. And the relationship is really there.”