Ernest Pintoff
Ernest Pintoff (* December 15 1931 in Watertown, Connecticut, † 12 January 2002 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California ) was an American film director, producer and screenwriter.
Life
Pintoff grew up in New York City and, after graduating in Graphic Design at Syracuse University in the mid-1950s a job at the UPA animation studios. However, he already changed shortly afterwards to Terrytoons, where he wrote the screenplay for the animated short film Flebus. He then started his own business in 1959 and produced the short film The Violinist, for which he was nominated for an Oscar and a British Film Academy Award. In 1963 he won the directing Oscar for the written by Mel Brooks animated satire The Critic.
In 1971 he turned the film collage Dynamite Chicken, in which appeared, among others, John Lennon, Richard Pryor and Andy Warhol. Between the mid- 1970s and mid-1980s Pintoff worked as a director of several television series such as Kojak - Kojak, Dallas and MacGyver and a few television films. After a stroke in 1985 ended his film career and began working as a lecturer at various institutes such as the American Film Institute, the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California.