HURD, Gale Anne

(1955-)

   US film producer who cut her teeth on Roger CORMAN's New World Pictures' exploitation movies; she was production manager on BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980) and coproduced the car-chase movie Smokey Bites the Dust (1981) with Corman. She came to prominence with the excellent low-budget independent film The TERMINATOR (1984), whose screenplay was cowritten by her and her then husband James CAMERON (also a graduate of the Corman school of low-budget film-making skills): both were in their 20s; he directed and she produced. This was sufficient to get them the high-status job of producing and directing ALIENS (1986), which they did with panache. They next worked together on The ABYSS (1989), whose screenplay (byCameron) contained roman a clef elements in its story of the break-up of a marriage between two highflying professionals; they had separated personally by then, and to a degree professionally, although GAH worked as executive producer on TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), perhaps the most expensive film ever made. (The actual producer was B.J. Rack.) GAH's expertise with genre movies was underwritten by two sf films she produced apart from Cameron, ALIEN NATION (1988) and TREMORS (1990), the latter being an especially craftsmanlike work. Among the non-sf and marginal sf features she has produced are Bad Dreams (1988), horror; The Waterdance (1992), drama about paraplegics; Raising Cain (1992), confused Brian dePalma thriller of some sf interest with its strange experiments in the PSYCHOLOGY of child-raising. More recently GAH returned to sf to produce the disappointing NO ESCAPE (1994), a future prison movie set on a tropical island. Although it is difficult to gauge the creative influence of producers as opposed to directors, GAH's track record is impressive; most of her films (even the low-budget ones) are polished and look good, and she seems to have an affinity with sf subjects.

   PN