Ernest Pintoff

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 cocreator 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 FiveO 1968 Kojak 1968 The Six Million Dollar Man 1974 The Dukes of Hazard 1979 Falcon Crest 1981 and Voyagers 1982 As part of NBCs 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 lowbudget independent films such as Harvey Middleman Fireman 1965 Who Killed Mary Whats 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 Societys Winsor McCay Award for prolific lifetime contributions to animation in 1998