Noel Black

American film director

Noel Black (June 30, 1937 – July 5, 2014) was an American film and television director, screenwriter, and producer. Black was born in Chicago, Illinois. He won awards at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival for an 18 minute short subject filmed in 1965 called Skaterdater. It had no dialogue, but used music and sound effects to advance the plot. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1966. As a screenwriter, he wrote the 1985 coming of age comedy Mischief, set in the 1950s. Black died of bacterial pneumonia in Santa Barbara, California on July 5, 2014.

Black was born in Chicago on June 30, 1937. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in film from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Black wrote and directed the 17 18 minute film, Skaterdater (1965), which had no dialogue and was set in California. The short film was about a group of teenage boy skateboarders as well as the romance between one of them and a girl on a bicycle. The short film garnered the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film at the 38th Oscar Ceremony (which it lost to Claude Berri's Le Poulet). "I didn’t begrudge UA the thousands they made from the short," Black commented. "It led to 20th Century Fox giving me the chance to make Pretty Poison, on which I was given fairly free rein." It was Black who decided to cast Perkins in the film: "I saw Tony (Perkins) in Neil Simon's The Star Spangled Girl on Broadway and thought he’d be ideal. I sent him the script, and he wanted to do it. I then met him for the first time at Joe Allen's after a performance of the play. He had enormous charm and intelligence, the very qualities I wanted to come through in the role he would be playing. I was looking for the young Tony of Friendly Persuasion and Fear Strikes Out, not Psycho, although commentators naturally made the comparison between Norman Bates and the character in Pretty Poison." "Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s screenplay is beautifully worked out, and the director, Noel Black, does a superb job of modulating the film's conflicting elements: the coming of age story and the thriller", Charles Taylor said in a New York Times review on the occasion of the film's DVD release, in 2006. He also directed episodes of such other TV series as McCloud, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and Hawaii Five O. In 1985, Black was the screenwriter and executive producer of Mischief, another teen sex comedy set in the 1950s. He also directed episodes of the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone.

Towards the end of Anthony Perkins' life, he fought long and hard to get Black to direct Psycho IV (1990), but that too was in vain.

The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Noel Black's films, including Reflections, The River Boy, and Skaterdater.