July 17

Director Alex Winter fulfills so many purposes for this blog. He's a successful writer/director who's been unfairly eclipsed by timing and one particular acting role.
See, if you went looking for Alex Winter in the video, you'd probably grab one of the Bill and Ted movies. If you wanted to show off, you might grab "The Lost Boys"


But it's the works you can't find so easily that make me an Alex Winter fan. Collaborating with Tom Stern and Tim Burns, Winter started working in the director's chair, making music videos for bands like Extreme and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, lensing the cult classic Freaked, and creating the psychotic MTV sketch comedy show The Idiot Box:

BTW, that's Tom Stern playing Lockjaw. Burns would become a head writer on 'Crank Yankers', while Stern would be a director on such TV comedies as 'The Man Show', 'The Andy Milonakis Show', and 'The Chimp Channel'. As for 'The Idiot Box', the show only made it to six episodes; not even enough for a DVD release, apparently...

For the rest of the 90's, he got married and directed music videos and commercials. His next movie - and his first solo directing effort - was 'Fever'; it was invited to the Director's Fortnight at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival that year.
But his directing breakthrough seems to have become the Ben 10 live-action movies.
The two movies are currently the highest rated programs ever on Cartoon Network (and unfortunately, might be why the 'CN' stopped making cartoons for a while...), and has made Alex Winter a director in demand.

As of 2010, he's working on a remake of the cult horror film The Gate (in 3-D!) and recently directed test footage for a proposed TV series based on the underappreciated comic book hero The Blue Beetle. (You can keep up with his future endeavors on his website for Trouper Productions.)

I'll end this post with a musical note, with a video he and his posse made for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' 'Knock Me Down':