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George Folsey Jr., the film editor and producer who collaborated with director John Landis on such films as Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Coming to America and An American Werewolf in London, has died. He was 85.
Folsey died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from pneumonia, his son, fellow film editor Ryan Folsey (Cabin Fever, Renfield), told The Hollywood Reporter.
His father was George J. Folsey, the famed 13-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose credits included The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), Thousands Cheer (1944), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Clock (1945), Green Dolphin Street (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949), Million Dollar Mermaid (1953), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
George Folsey Jr. also edited Shawn Levy’s Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) and The Pink Panther (2006) and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007).
After cutting Landis’ directorial debut, Schlock (1973), Folsey edited the Landis-helmed The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980) and Coming to America (1988), which he also produced.
He also served as a producer on Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981), Trading Places (1983), Michael Jackson’s iconic 1983 music video for “Thriller,” Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Into the Night (1985), Spies Like Us (1985) and Three Amigos! (1986).
During the filming of Landis’ segment for Twilight Zone, actor Vic Morrow, 53, and two child actors, My-Ca Dinh Le, 7, and Renee Chen, 6, were killed in a helicopter accident on July, 23, 1982, during a Vietnam War scene being done late at night.
In May 1987, Folsey, Landis and three others were acquitted on charges of manslaughter during a nine-month trial that featured 93 days of testimony.
“The jury came out at the end of the trial and gave a press conference and said, ‘We saw this as an accident, and we don’t understand why’d you prosecute people for an accident,’” he recalled in a recent interview with producer-author Kevin Goetz for the Don’t Kill the Messenger podcast.
George Joseph Folsey Jr. was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 17, 1939. While his mother, Angele, was a housewife, his father — who started out as Paramount co-founder Adolph Zukor’s office boy in Astoria, Queens — spent the bulk of his career at MGM.
“Going down to visit him on his sets was such a pleasure,” he said. “I met Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner and Esther Williams, who I had a terrible crush on. It was a wonderful way to grow up.” He said Williams gave him a swimming lesson at the family pool at their Brentwood home.
He attended St. Paul the Apostle, Loyola High School and Pomona College and landed a job at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, where he cut documentaries and news stories for about five years. He then segued to MGM and was assigned to assist Oscar-winning film editor Henry Berman (Grand Prix), who had worked with his dad.
He edited an episode of NBC’s The Monkees in 1967 and a 1968 documentary about figure skater Peggy Fleming for which his father won an Emmy, then cut the 1970 doc Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. On the 1972 feature Glass Houses, he was film editor, cinematographer (alongside his dad), camera operator and producer.
Folsey was on the set when Morrow and the two children from Vietnam were killed. He told Goetz that he drove the father of one of the boys to his mother to tell her what had happened, and he delivered a eulogy at Morrow’s funeral.
On Trading Places, he said he came up with the title — it was originally called Black and White — and served as a second-unit director, too. In the movie, his name is mentioned when Dan Aykroyd’s Louis Winthorpe hands his coat to an attendant and says, “Good morning, Folsey.”
His producing credits also included Jonathan Lynn’s Clue (1985), Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love (1993), Howard Deutch’s Grumpier Old Men (1995) and Scott Spiegel’s Hostel: Part III (2011).
Goetz called him a “fixer” of movies, to which Folsey replied: “The trick is, when you’re going to fix a movie, a lot of people come in and say, ‘We’re just going to clean house.’ And that’s without question the worst thing you can do because you alienate the director, the editor, everybody. They know the movie better than you … so I would try to befriend them and help them.”
His dad, who received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award shortly before his death at age 90 in 1988, worked on about 160 films during his remarkable career from 1919 until his retirement in 1976.
In addition to his son, Folsey is survived by his wife, Belinda; daughter Erin; son-in-law Doug; daughter-in-law Erica; and granddaughters Lucia, Chloe and Hazel.
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