As flamboyant as any character in his movies, Joel Silver can be
credited along with Jerry Bruckheimer as practically reinventing the action film
genre in the 1980s. Born in New Jersey, he attended the New York
University Film School. After college, he worked at Lawrence Gordon Pictures,
earning his first onscreen credit as associate producer of Die Warriors (1979). He
eventually became president of the motion picture division of Gordon
Pictures. Together with Gordon, Silver produced Nur 48 Stunden (1982) and Straßen in Flammen (1984). In
1983 he formed Silver Pictures and initially set up shop at Universal Pictures to
produce Zum Teufel mit den Kohlen (1985) before going to Fox and continued producing hit action films
such as Phantom Kommando (1985), the "Lethal Weapon" franchise, the first two films of
the "Die Hard" franchise and the three films of "Matrix" franchise of action
films. He had then subsequently joined Warner Bros. in 1987 after leaving Fox.
Despite these successes, he has hit some rough spots and has
been banned from working on several studio lots. He was unable to
produce the "48 Hrs" sequel Und wieder 48 Stunden (1990), the third "Die Hard" film,
Stirb langsam - Jetzt erst recht (1995) and the fourth "Matrix" installment Matrix Resurrections (2021)
because of past run-ins with studio executives. Because of his
habit of wearing sport shirts and talking loudly and quickly, he has
been parodied in several films, even spoofing himself in Falsches Spiel mit Roger Rabbit (1988) by
playing the frustrated cartoon director in the film's opening sequence.
In order to perform in that role, he had to use an alias to get onto
the Walt Disney lot, and his onscreen credit was not revealed to Disney
executives until the very last minute. He had worked in television, setting
up his own television branch with his first project Parker Kane - Die Gewalt im Nacken (1990), a project
that would eventually never made to series, and then worked at HBO for
many years, until he found a home at Warner Bros. Television in 1998, where
he had developed two UPN shows The Strip (1999) and Freedom (2000)
before finding commercial success with the hit Veronica Mars (2004). In 1999, Silver
Pictures had teamed up with film director/producer Robert Zemeckis to set
up Dark Castle Entertainment to produce genre and horror films with the first
film under Dark Castle being Haunted Hill (1999). Joel Silver pioneered the
practice of shooting action movies in Australia with the "Matrix"
films, and has been credited with either inventing or reinventing the
careers of Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal. He was mentioned in Halle Berry's
Academy Award acceptance speech. Other credits include non-action
pictures, ranging from Xanadu (1980), L.I.S.A. - Der helle Wahnsinn (1985) and Die Gebrüder Weihnachtsmann (2007) to HBO's
long-running TV series, Geschichten aus der Gruft (1989). He had resigned from his founding
production company in 2019.
