David Chute, a longtime film critic and writer who tirelessly championed Hong Kong films in the U.S., died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
His daughter, Nora Chute, confirmed that he died of esophageal cancer.<\/p>\n
Chute wrote for publications including the Boston Phoenix, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and\u00a0Variety<\/em>, often advocating for genre films and international filmmakers to get the recognition they deserved.<\/p>\n Chute grew up in Maine with his father, Robert, a poet and biology professor at Bates College, his mother, Vicki, a novelist. He launched his career in the 70s as a film critic at the Kennebec Journal and The Maine Times, where he discovered Stephen King, who he also profiled for Take One. In 1979, King inscribed a copy of \u201cThe Shining\u201d to David Chute, \u201cthe best film critic in America.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1978, Chute joined the staff of The Boston Phoenix, where he was an early champion of such innovative horror auteurs as George Romero and John Carpenter. Chute was always ahead of the curve, taking genre fiction, movies, comics, and graphic novels seriously long before other critics had heard of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, R. Crumb, or Harvey Pekar.<\/p>\n \u201cI never could have survived those first years without his ability to take on anything I threw at him and turn out a fluid critical piece, glinting with nuggets of insight,\u201d his Phoenix film editor Stephen Schiff wrote on a long Facebook thread about Chute\u2019s impact on a generation of film critics. \u201cGenre and all the strong sensations that came with it attracted him, then obsessed him \u2013 I first read the then-under-recognized Stephen King just to see what David was going on about \u2013 and it was fascinating to watch him keep pushing his connoisseurship into ever more niche niches\u2026He threw a lot of light into what, for most American readers, had been some fairly obscure corners.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1981, Film Comment ran two career-defining profiles by Chute in the same issue, on indie mavericks John Sayles and John Waters, who along with Stephen King attended his 1983 wedding to Film Comment associate editor Anne Thompson. \u201cDavid Chute was one of the few critics who championed my early films and his reviews were a huge help in getting my career on track,\u201d wrote John Waters in an email. \u201cHe understood my humor and knew there really COULD be such a thing as exploitation films for art theaters.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1982, Chute joined Peter Rainer as a film critic at The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where Chute was nominated for a Pulitzer for his ten-part series \u201cBehind the Screen\u201d on the crafts of movies. But he also continued to file stories for Film Comment. Over the years, Chute profiled David Cronenberg, Roger Corman, George Miller, Joe Dante, Brian De Palma, Water Hill, James Cameron, Zhang Yimou, Suzuki Seijun, Tsui Hark, and Hayao Miyazaki, and edited influential sections on Hong Kong and Bollywood Cinema. Pauline Kael quoted Chute\u2019s Miller profile in her New Yorker review of \u201cThe Road Warrior.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Chute also covered Lawrence Kasdan for American Film; Jackie Chan, Youssef Chahine, Om Puri, and Pedro Almodovar for the LA Weekly; Philip Kaufman and Francis Ford Coppola for the Los Angeles Times; and Gong Li and\u00a0John Woo\u00a0for Vanity Fair. \u00a0\u201cI honestly can\u2019t cite another critic \u2014 including Ebert and Kael,\u201d wrote L.A. critic Wade Major, \u201cwho appears to have touched so many lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of all Chute helped to popularize Hong Kong cinema in the U.S., especially filmmaker John Woo (\u201cA Better Tomorrow,\u201d \u201cHardboiled\u201d), introducing him to Universal executive James Jacks, who backed Woo\u2019s first American movie, \u201cHard Target.\u201d Chute served as unit publicist on that film, and Woo\u2019s \u201cBroken Arrow,\u201d as well as Quentin Tarantino\u2019s \u201cJackie Brown.\u201d Together David and Tarantino recorded commentary tracks for a set of classic martial arts re-releases from Hong Kong\u2019s Shaw Brothers Studios, and Chute contributed to several Criterion Collection releases for Hong Kong films.<\/p>\n \u201cDavid was an extremely fine and insightful writer on cinema and I always enjoyed the articles and criticisms he wrote for various film magazines,\u201d wrote producer Terence Chang in an email. \u201cHe championed the films of John Woo and other Hong Kong directors long before anyone had heard of them. Similarly, he introduced us to the brilliance of Indian cinema when nobody had taken it seriously. Most of all, David was the most decent, genuine, honest and the kindest friend I have ever known. A rare breed in this industry that he worked in.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2003, Chute and Cheng-Sim Lim curated a UCLA Film and Television Archive series, Heroic Grace: Chinese Martial Arts Film, accompanied by essays by critics David Bordwell and Berenice Reynaud, among others, and in 2004, Chute curated the Indian cinema series Bombay Melody at UCLA. \u201cDavid had a knack for doing things like that,\u201d wrote Lim, \u201crecognizing talent where other folks (especially Western critics) weren\u2019t looking.\u201d<\/p>\n From 2004-2013, Chute was the senior writer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, while continuing to supply reviews of new Bollywood releases to the LA Weekly,\u00a0Variety<\/em>\u00a0and IndieWire. In recent years, he had been preparing the first definitive historical overview of Wuxia martial arts cinema.<\/p>\n He is predeceased by his parents and survived by his sister Dian Chute; daughter Nora Chute, a producer; and wife Anne Thompson, editor-at-large at Indiewire.<\/p>\n A memorial service will be privately held in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n (Pictured: Chow Yun-Fat and David Chute)<\/em><\/p>\n