John Milius

John Frederick Milius (/ˈmɪliəs/; born April 11, 1944) is an American screenwriter, film director, and co-founder of the UFC. He is considered a member of the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers.

He rose to prominence in the early 1970s for writing the scripts for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Jeremiah Johnson (also 1972), and the first two Dirty Harry films. He made his directorial debut with the film Dillinger (1973), followed by The Wind and the Lion (1975) and Big Wednesday (1978). In 1980, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Apocalypse Now, which he co-wrote with Francis Ford Coppola.

During the 1980s, Milius established himself as a director of action and adventure films, with Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Red Dawn (1984). He was also a prolific script doctor. He later served as the co-creator of the Primetime Emmy Award-winning television series Rome (2005–2007).

Off-screen, Milius is known for his eccentric personality and libertarian political views, variously and contradictorily self-described as a "Zen anarchist," "right-wing extremist," and "Maoist." He served as a director of the National Rifle Association of America (NRA).

Milius was born April 11, 1944, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three children to Elizabeth Marie (née Roe; 1906–2010) and William Styx Milius (1889–1975), who was a shoe manufacturer. When Milius was seven, his father sold Milius Shoe Company, which his grandfather George W. Milius had founded in 1923, and retired. He moved the family to Bel Air, California. John Milius became an enthusiastic surfer. At 14, his parents sent him to a small private school, the Lowell Whiteman School, in the mountains of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, because he "was a juvenile delinquent".

Milius became a voracious reader and started to write short stories: "I had learned very early, to write in almost any style. I could write in fluent Hemingway, or in fluent Melville, or Conrad, or Jack Kerouac, and whatever." He says he was also influenced by the oral story telling of surfers at the time, who had a beatnik tradition.

"My religion is surfing", Milius said in 1976, adding that "the other thing that influenced me throughout my youth was my involvement with things Japanese. I studied judo, kendo, and painting. I felt more comfortable with things Japanese and with Japanese people than I did with Europeans ... feudalism in any country, at any period, fascinates me ... I understand the reasoning of people in Asia, it makes sense to me. Zen is very sensible, the whole way of feeling things is logical, whereas many of the Western-motivated things—greed, business sense—I'm not comfortable with, I don't understand their rationale."

Milius says he attempted to join the Marine Corps and volunteer for Vietnam War service in the late 1960s, but was rejected due to a "chronic" and "sometimes disabling" case of mild asthma. "I'd have given anything to be a Marine", said Milius. "As a surfer I'd spent a lot of time hanging out with the Marines off Pendleton, and I'd had every intention of joining up ... I was devastated, I felt like I'd been rejected as a human being." "It was totally demoralizing", he said later. "I missed going to my war. It probably caused me to be obsessed with war ever since." Milius said he was "dying to be able to... go prove myself in battle—the same as all young men long to do, if they are honest with themselves, whether it's right or wrong or even sane, which is a debate that's been going on since we left the caves. Only there was no way I could found my own unit, so I did the second best, which was to write it. Every writer wishes he could actually be doing the thing he writes about." He later admitted, "I don't know how well I'd have done. I really wanted a military career, to be a general, but I had a hard time polishing shoes. And marching. I was in the ROTC once, and I hate marching ... I would have been good in the Mexican Army."