Larry Peerce

Larry Peerce was born in 1930 in Bronx, New York, to the later Metropolitan Opera tenor Jan Peerce and his wife, Alice. Peerce's directorial career stretched from 1964 to 2001, embraced different genres and generated different results. In the 1960s it seemed as if Peerce would become a major filmmaker. His first film, One Potato, Two Potato (1964), was a sensitively told story about an interracial marriage. It won an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Orville H. Hampton and Raphael Hayes, and garnered Barbara Barrie top acting honors at the Cannes Film Festival. While toiling on series TV in the mid-'60s, helming the westerns Branded (1965) and The Wild Wild West (1965), Peerce made a successful rock-and-roll concert film, The Big T.N.T. Show (1965), which showcased a lot of talent, including The Ronettes and producer Phil Spector. He next made the interesting The Incident (1967), a film based on a true story about a pair of teenage toughs terrorizing the riders