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For more than sixty years John Hancock has pursued a remarkable and often tumultuous career as a writer/director/producer. From the hallucinatory horrors of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and the gritty fantasy of Prancer to the unshakable humanity of Bang the Drum Slowly, Weeds and The Looking Glass, he has cultivated a deeply personal yet accessible cinema; one that yields a textured emotionalism and philosophical richness that belies its surface simplicity. Hancock on Hancock draws on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with the filmmaker over the course of five years, providing a candid commentary on one man’s life and work filtered through his unceasing desire to create art and tell stories.
With chapters devoted to every film he has made – including his Academy Award-nominated short Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet and his anonymous contributions to the troubled Hollywood movies Wolfen and 8 Million Ways to Die – these conversations also throw a spotlight on Hancock’s lively experiences directing classic and contemporary plays Off-Broadway, as well as charting his labors on such iconic television shows as The Twilight Zone and Hill Street Blues. Additionally, he offers a harrowing account of his notorious dismissal from the blockbuster sequel Jaws 2 and shares unbuttoned recollections of collaborators like Robert De Niro, Tennessee Williams, Jean Arthur, Nick Nolte, Faye Dunaway and Dorothy Tristan.
About the author
Michael Doyle is a reporter in Washington, DC with E&E News/POLITICO and formerly was with the DC bureau of the McClatchy newspaper chain. He holds master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Yale Law School, where he was a Knight Journalism Fellow. He is the author of The Forestport Breaks: A Nineteenth-Century Conspiracy along the Black River Canal and The Ministers' War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community, and the Crusade for Public Morality, both also published by Syracuse University Press.
