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Tribute to Andy Sidaris
March 12, 2007
I was extremely saddened when I heard of the death of TV director and filmmaker Andy Sidaris last week - he died of throat cancer on March 7 at the age of 76.
Sidaris started out in the business as a director of televised sporting events, winning an Emmy in 1969 for his director of the prior year’s Summer Olympics. He directed sports TV for some 25 years before moving on to the "Bullets, Bombs & Babes B-movies" for which he’s best known. His dozen genre film titles in this arena include Hard Ticket To Hawaii (1987), Hard Hunted (1992), Day of the Warrior (1996) and L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies: Return to Savage Beach (1998). Sidaris’s films walk the
line between the action excursions of video auteurs Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski and the Playboy Wet and Wild series. The films of Andy Sidaris (the majority of which were produced by his wife, Arlene) regularly feature a cast of secret agents made up of former Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets (including Julie Strain, pictured here with Andy) and pec-heavy leading hunks (like professional wrestler Buff Bagwell), a globe-spanning James Bondian mission, an arsenal of high-tech weapons, a healthy but not too prominent dose of sex and an inevitable sequence where a top-heavy female agent announces that she’s gong to take a shower. Sidaris’s films were always a lot of fun, which is probably what helped to make them such a major part of the first lucrative wave of late-night cable TV fare and straight-to-tape (remember that term?) cinema that emerged in the late Eighties.
I had several opportunities to interview and dine with the Sidarises as they began issuing their library on DVD a few of years back. They were a charming, witty and hospitable pair and the work they put into their supplements-laden DVDs reflects this all too well. I remember once asking Andy why he waited so long to issue his work on disc and he was quick laugh back that “The reason we were holding back is because we still don’t know how to use VHS!”
Posted by Laurence Lerman on March 12, 2007 | Comments (0)
