George Armitage

George Armitage
George Armitage
Born	George Brendan Armitage Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation	Director, Writer, Producer, Actor
Years active	1965–present
Children	Brent Armitage

George Armitage (born 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer who got his start as part of the stable of up-and-coming filmmakers who broke into the business through Roger Corman's New World Pictures. He is most well known as the director of the films Miami Blues and Grosse Pointe Blank.

Armitage was born in Hartford Connecticut and moved to Beverly Hills in 1956, when he was 13. "What a culture shock," he reflected later. "I’m still reeling. In Connecticut there wasn’t a hot rod in sight. Out here it was people racing up and down the street, building their own cars—it was teenage paradise, the kids were running everything." He attended UCLA where he majored in economics and political science. While waiting for his real estate licence to come through, Armitage entered the film industry in 1965 via the mail room at 20th Century Fox. He later said:

I have a very personal relationship to film. I've gone to films all the time since I was a kid. I thought I could have some fun trying to make them. I always thought I was pretty close to what people were thinking. There's lots of tricks to be played, things to be done in film. Film is so close to the way the mind works - the way the mind communicates with itself. Film is a dream, an emotional coda.

In 1966 Armitage became an associate producer on Peyton Place, "primarily to deal with the young kids on the show, to help them loop their lines." Armitage recalls his period at Fox as an "incredible experience":

This was just at the time when the fortysomething producers who were kind of hip and jazz-oriented were coming in… I was 21, 22, something like that, and if you were young, if you had an opinion, were kind of hip, knew what was going on with your own generation, you were very valuable. So I went from producer to producer all over the lot pitching ideas, I created series, I wrote a couple of things for television and, about that time, started writing screenplays.

Armitage worked as associate producer on Judd for the Defense and created a TV series and tried to co-produce a TV movie but neither went beyond script stage.

Armitage met Gene and Roger Corman at Fox while they were making The St. Valentine's Day Massacre:

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