Ernest Pintoff — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Ernest Pintoff (December 15, 1931 in Watertown, Connecticut – January 12, 2002 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles) was an American film and television director, screenwriter and film producer.

He won the Oscar for Best Animated Short for The Critic (1963), a satire on modern art written and narrated by Mel Brooks.

Born in Watertown, Connecticut, but raised in New York City, Pintoff originally began as a jazz trumpeter who taught painting and design at Michigan State University. However, he had always shown an interest in the animation of film and began writing in 1956.

His career took off in 1957, when he wrote the script for Flebus, followed by 1959 as a producer and director for the animated short film, The Violinist. Narrated by Carl Reiner, the film earned Pintoff an Oscar nomination and illustrated a promising young career in directing film ahead of him.

In 1964, he won an Oscar for his direction of the 1963 film, The Critic, which was narrated by co-creator Mel Brooks and focused on a man with a grumpy voice trying to understand abstractions he observes.

On television, Pintoff directed many episodes of popular television series, including Hawaii Five-O (1968), Kojak (1968), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), The Dukes of Hazard (1979), Falcon Crest (1981) and Voyagers! (1982). As part of NBC's "Experiments in Television" in the late 1960s, he also directed the documentaries This Is Marshall McLuhan and This Is Sholem Aleichem.

Pintoff produced and directed a number of low-budget independent films such as Harvey Middleman, Fireman (1965), Who Killed Mary What's 'Er Name? (1971) and Dynamite Chicken (1972), a film using a collection of old clips from music with appearances by John Lennon, Richard Pryor and Andy Warhol, Nel mirino del giaguaro (1979).

Following his last film in 1985, Pintoff taught directing at the School of Visual Arts, American Film Institute, USC School of Cinematic Arts, California Institute of the Arts and UCLA.

He received the International Animated Film Society's Winsor McCay Award for prolific lifetime contributions to animation in 1998.