Jim Jarmusch
James Roberto "Jim" Jarmusch (; born January 22, 1953) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer. Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s. His film Stranger Than Paradise (1984), was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002.
Early life
The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15 ... As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant – a benign, fascinated foreigner – ever since. And all his films are about that.
Jarmusch was born to a family of middle-class suburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953. His mother, of Irish and German descent, had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced the future director, the middle of three children, to the world of cinema by leaving him at a local cinema to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road (starring Robert Mitchum) the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.
