George Armitage, Grosse Pointe Blank and Miami Blues director, dies

George Armitage, the director of Grosse Pointe Blank and Miami Blues, as well as a close collaborator of Roger Corman’s, has died. He was 82.

George Armitage entered the business in the ‘70s but it took a while to find his footing. That came with 1990’s Miami Blues, which starred Alec Baldwin as a criminal fresh out of prison posing as a cop with a stolen police badge. Armitage would develop his mixture of crime and comedy later that decade with 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank with John Cusack and Minnie Driver.

Even though he was a buddy of Corman’s, it does feel like George Armitage is too rarely mentioned in the list of notable directors who got their start working under him. But we can’t ignore where he got his start. George Armitage met Roger Corman at just the right time in the 1960s. In 1971, Corman hired him to write Gas-s-s, a low-budget movie about a gas leak that targets people over the age of 25. That Armitage was on the cusp of 30 at the time of its release yet just getting his career going added some fun irony to it. Corman next gave Armitage a shot behind the lens with The Student Nurses sequel Private Duty Nurses. (He’d be relegated back to writing duties for the third movie in the series, Night Call Nurses.)

George Armitage would handle the genre scene quite well throughout the ‘70s, writing and directing the Bernie Casey- and Pam Grier-starring Hit Man (1972) and 1976’s Vigilante Force with Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent. While he would only write it, I’d put 1975’s Darktown Strutters at the top. He also had a small role in Caged Heat, the Roger Corman production that gave Jonathan Demme his own breakout.

On the TV front George Armitage wrote and directed the pretty snazzy Hot Rod (1979) while taking writing duties on The Late Shift, which traced the rivalry between David Letterman and Jay Leno. For that, he earned a Primetime Emmy nomination.

What is your favorite George Armitage work? Give us your pick and pay tribute to the writer/director in the comments section below.

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