Richard Compton

Writer/director/producer Richard Compton was born on March 2, 1938, in Philadelphia, PA. He began his career in the early 1960s making government propaganda movies for the United States Information Agency. His debut feature "The French Way", was never released in America. Compton followed this film with the nifty biker flick Angels Die Hard (1970), which was the first movie to be released by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Compton then did the excellent and unjustly overlooked psycho Vietnam veterans exploitation winner Welcome Home Soldier Boys (1971). He scored his biggest hit with the outstanding cult classic Macon County Line (1974); the unexpected enormous box-office success of this movie begot a handful of similar Southern-fried "don't go down to Dixie" drive-in pictures, which include Jackson County Jail (1976), A Small Town in Texas (1976), and Nightmare in Badham County (1976). Both the tepid semi-sequel Return to Macon County (1975) starring then-unknowns Nick Nolte and Do