By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director William Dear, who helmed Timerider, Angels In The Outfield, and Harry And The Hendersons.
Canadian-born William Dear is a quietly fascinating figure, and also something of a rarity: he’s an Unsung Auteur who exists somewhat in the shadow of another Unsung Auteur, which makes him pretty Unsung, but pretty damn cool too. We’d like to take this opportunity to do a little low-key celebrating of Mr. William Dear, but first, a word on Michael Nesmith, the man with whom Dear frequently collaborated early in his career, and with whom he quietly revolutionised the world of television and music video.
Though best known as the son of the woman who invented Liquid Paper (remember that?) and as the member of the 1960s pop group and TV sensation The Monkees who wore the wool cap, the late Michael Nesmith was much, much more than that. The Texan-born Nesmith was also a gifted singer/songwriter, and after The Monkees phenomenon fizzled, he recorded a collection of extraordinary country-rock records in the 1970s that stand today as gorgeous, near-undiscovered jewels filled with trippy Americana to rival even the great Gram Parsons. In the 1980s, Nesmith then created the foundation for what would eventually become the music video, and his later concept for a TV show comprised of said music videos would eventually be purchased and developed by the players behind what would evolve into the era-defining pop cultural behemoth that is MTV. Yes, Michael Nesmith pretty much invented country-rock, music video and MTV, but you have to dig around a little for those facts.
Michael Nesmith’s right-hand man during those revolutionary days back in the 1980s was William Dear. While the high ideas likely came from Michael Nesmith, they were presumably nutted out and made real by William Dear. It was Dear who directed the 1977 video clip for Nesmith’s song “Rio” after having made two exploitation feature films: the sexy 1973 flick Nymph and the blood-soaked 1976 biker blow-out The Northville Cemetery Massacre, for which Nesmith composed the music for free. Nesmith then engaged Dear to direct the music video TV series PopClips, which was broadcast weekly on the youth-oriented cable channel Nickelodeon in late 1980 and early 1981, and would ultimately morph into MTV. Dear also directed Nesmith’s Grammy Award-winning (the first for Best Video) 1981 long-form video Elephant Parts, which was a mix of music and comedy and marked another pioneering work from the duo. Dear also directed Nesmith’s 1980s TV projects Television Parts and Doctor Duck’s Super Secret All-Purpose Sauce.
Michael Nesmith and William Dear also collaborated on one feature film with 1982’s Timerider: The Adventure Of Lyle Swann. Scored, produced and co-written by Nesmith and co-written and directed by Dear, this is a cracking little early 1980s gem with the late, great Fred Ward in the title role of a renowned dirt bike racer tearing through the desert who rides right through the middle of a time travel experiment and roars back in time to 1877, where he tangles with an outlaw gang led by the villainous Porter Reese (Peter Coyote) and enjoys a sweet romance with the plucky, tough-minded Claire, played by Aussie model-turned-actress (and now spiritual psychologist) Belinda Bauer (who also appeared in Unsung Auteur William Richert’s Winter Kills and The American Success Company, and the smash Flashdance, amongst others). Though threaded through with Nesmith’s noted trippiness, Timerider: The Adventure Of Lyle Swann is essentially an enjoyable romp, and a thoroughly entertaining one at that. Fred Ward makes for a great hero, and the film’s playful toying with western tropes is truly joyful. Interestingly, it’s the engaging folksiness and richly American qualities of Timerider that would ultimately indicate the unexpected future direction of William Dear’s career.
Nesmith and Dear’s collaborative creative relationship ended amicably in the mid-1980s, and Dear bounced back immediately with what still stands as the director’s biggest hit and most well-known film. A highly entertaining family flick, 1987’s Harry And The Hendersons was helped to the screen by Steven Spielberg (Dear directed an episode of the Hollywood powerhouse’s anthology TV series Amazing Stories and pitched him the idea upon the producer’s imploring) and stars John Lithgow and Melinda Dillon. Deliriously high concept, the film follows a suburban American family who end up adopting Bigfoot, with hi-jinx and life-changing moments aplenty. Sweet and charming with a winningly environmentalist bent, Harry And The Hendersons was a box office smash, and won an Oscar for Best Make-Up and also inspired a popular TV series. The film showcased William Dear’s gift for finely tuned sentiment, and also his ability to effectively give something goofy a little traction and grounding. Considering his early exploitation work and trippy creative excursions with Michael Nesmith, the huge success of Harry And The Hendersons would see William Dear embark on a surprisingly long, very successful career in the worlds of television and family films.
As well as many telemovies and episodes of TV series (including the likes of Dinosaurs and Covington Cross), Dear directed a host of fun, sweetly focused family films, often set in the worlds of sport (Disney’s 1994 effort Angels In The Outfield mixed baseball and heavenly intervention and featured Joseph Gordon-Levitt in an early lead role; 2009’s The Perfect Game told the true story of a group of boys from Monterrey, Mexico who became the first non-US team to win the Little League World Series; 2007’s The Sandlot: Heading Home mixed baseball with time travel) and front-lining adventure and environmentalism (1997’s Wild America; 2013’s Midnight Stallion). Dear did make the occasional detour back into non-family flicks (the now forgotten 1991 spy actioner If Looks Could Kill, a vehicle for momentary 21 Jump Street star Richard Grieco; the 2011 comedy Politics Of Love; 2006’s horror Simon Says starring Crispin Glover; 2021’s Whack The Don, and a few others), but despite his violent and sexy early work, sentiment and warmth turned out to be the writer/director’s true home.
Unsurprisingly, the now 80-year-old and presumably retired William Dear has a simple and endearingly low-key take on his impressive, decades-long career as a filmmaker. “I’ve always been a storyteller, and filmmaking gives us every tool imaginable to tell a story,” the truly fascinating William Dear told The Detroit Free Press in 2019. “Movie-making is the ultimate way to tell stories.”
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
