From Duddy to Rambo
Canadian looks back at lengthy Hollywood career
Canadian writer-director Ted Kotcheff has racked up a wide variety of credits in his long career, from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s.
He’s directed many Hollywood heavyweights, including Gregory Peck, William Shatner, Ingrid Bergman and Gene Hackman, and developed a close friendship and working relationship with the late author Mordecai Richler.
Most recently he’s been an executive producer for hundreds of episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, one of the longest-running TV shows ever.
All this from the most humble of beginnings in Toronto during the Great Depression, Kotcheff writes in his candid new memoir Director’s Cut: My Life in Film, when his Bulgarian father and Macedonian mother were so poor they couldn’t afford coal or wood to heat their home.
One winter night, when temperatures dipped to about -40 C, a nearly two-year-old Kotcheff almost froze to death.
“I was blue and I could hardly breathe and my mother woke up and she saw me, this blue frozen piece of meat, and she screamed,” the raconteur, 85, said.
His father, a marathon runner, ran 20 blocks to get a doctor while his uncle risked being arrested by chopping down two spruce trees and dragging them back for firewood.
“The doctor arrived, he plunged the thermometer up my bum, pulled it out, it was 84 — two degrees from death — and he said, ‘Hypothermia!’ ... He picked me up and dropped me in the boiling water and I screamed bloody murder.”
Kotcheff ’s book contains rich detail about his subsequent work in TV and film with behind-the-scenes experiences with the stars.
Because there wasn’t much of a film industry in Canada yet, he moved to England in the late 1950s and it was in London where he and Richler became roommates and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was written.
“I read the whole book at one sitting ... and said, ‘Mordecai, not only is this one of the great Canadians novels ever written, but one day I’m going to go back to Canada and make a film out of it,’ ” he said.
The book would eventually be turned into a Quebec-shot film, released in 1974, that earned Richler an Oscar nomination.
It also gave Kotcheff his big break in Hollywood — and plenty of great stories.
Kotcheff dabbled with the action-adventure genre on First Blood and remembered Sylvester Stallone’s commitment to performing his stunts. A scene in which Stallone’s John Rambo falls off a cliff onto a tree branch left the actor with four broken ribs.
“He let out the most incredibly crying pain, ‘Ahhhh,’ and people said, ‘what a wonderful performance,’” recalled Kotcheff. “That was no performance. That was the pain of cracking four ribs.”