John Milius

John Frederick Milius is an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures. He was one of the writers for the first two Dirty Harry films, received an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, and wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. He wrote a number of iconic film lines such as "Charlie don't surf" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," from Apocalypse Now, and the famous Dirty Harry one-liners delivered by Clint Eastwood, including "Go ahead, make my day" and "Ask yourself one question, 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?". Milius also wrote the USS Indianapolis monologue in the film Jaws; the sequence performed by Robert Shaw. After his work on Rough Riders (1997), Milius became an instrumental force in lobbying Congress to award President Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor (posthumously), for acts of conspicuous gallantry while in combat on San Juan Hill. Milius made two films featuring Roosevelt: The Wind and the Lion (where he was played by Brian Keith) and the made-for-TV film Rough Riders (where Tom Berenger took the role). The character of John Milner from the 1973 George Lucas film American Graffiti was inspired by Milius, who was a good friend of Lucas while they were at USC film school. Likewise, the character Walter Sobchak in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, made by his friends the Coen Brothers, was partly based on Milius. The novella "Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls" by Aleksandar Hemon features an episode with Milius, who is described as "sitting at a desk sucking on a cigar as long as a walking stick." In 2013 a documentary about his life, titled Milius, was released. Writer Nat Segaloff called Milius: "The best writer of the so-called USC Mafia, a tight-knit group that resuscitated—some say homogenised American cinema in the 1970s... Raised on Ford, Hawks, Lean and Kurosawa, shaped by filmmakers as disparate as Fellini and Delmer Daves, Milius favours history books over comic books, character over special effects, and heroes with roots in reality, time, place and customs. Milius' stories reflect his own deeply held ethic, which embraces the values of tradition, adventure, spiritualism, honour and an intense loyalty to friends... Although he privately chafes at his public image as a gun-toting, liberal baiting provocateur, he allows himself to be painted as such, at times even holding the brush. He plays the Hollywood game like a pro, yet sticks to his own rules; he is a romantic filmmaker who avoids love scenes; his movies contain violence, yet no death in them is without meaning." Milius himself once said: "Never compromise excellence. To write for someone else is the biggest mistake that any writer makes. You should be your biggest competitor, your biggest critic, your biggest fan, because you don’t know what anybody else thinks. How arrogant it is to assume that you know the market, that you know what’s popular today [...] Write what you want to see. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to have any true passion in it, and it’s not going to be done with any true artistry."

Known For: Writing

Born: St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 1944-04-11

Died: null

No.	Year	Title	Role	Vote Average
1	1972	Deadhead Miles	State Trooper	55
2	1975	The Lion Roars Again	Self	0
3	1975	Crazy Mama	Cop (uncredited)	56
4	1982	Conan the Barbarian	Foodseller in Old City (uncredited)	68
5	1986	Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away	Self	0
6	1989	First Works	Self	0
7	1991	Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse	Self	79
8	1995	Shotgun Freeway: Drives Through Lost L.A.	self	0
9	1996	The Making of '1941'	Self	66
10	1997	In the Teeth of Jaws	Self	80
11	1998	A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne and 'The Searchers'	Self (voice)	0
12	1999	Hell Hath No Fury: The Making of The Outlaw Josey Wales	Narrator	70
13	2000	Conan Unchained: The Making of 'Conan'	Self	67
14	2000	The Bridge on the River Kwai: An Appreciation by Filmmaker John Milius	Self	0
15	2001	Dino De Laurentiis: The Last Movie Mogul	Self	60
16	2001	Dirty Harry: The Original	Self - Screenwriter	74
17	2002	Iron and Beyond	Self - Director	53
18	2003	Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood	Self	71
19	2003	Frazetta: Painting with Fire	Himself	64
20	2003	Discovering Treasure: The Story of 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'	Narrator (voice)	65
21	2003	An Opera of Violence	Self - Filmmaker	60
22	2003	The Wages of Sin	Self - Filmmaker	74
23	2003	Something to Do with Death	Self - Filmmaker	60
24	2004	Riding Giants	John Milius	76
25	2004	A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope	Self	75
26	2006	The Searchers: An Appreciation	Self	0
27	2008	The Business End: Violence in Cinema	Self	80
28	2008	The Evolution of Clint Eastwood	Self	70
29	2008	The Craft of Dirty Harry	Self	60
30	2008	Between the Lines: The True Story of Surfers and the Vietnam War	Narrator	0
31	2008	A Moral Right: The Politics of Dirty Harry	Self	45
32	2008	The Long Shadow of Dirty Harry	Self	58
33	2008	Hollywood Gangster	Self	0
34	2010	Jaws: The Inside Story	Self	73
35	2013	Milius	Self	71
36	2017	Made in Hollywood: Die Welt des Raoul Walsh	Self	0
37	2019	Sword-and-Sandal: The Story of the Period Epic	Self - Filmmaker	70
38	2019	A Riddle of Steel: The Definitive History of Conan the Barbarian	Self (archive footage)	85

John Milius

Film

Television