Jack Sholder

Jack Sholder studied English literature, but fell in love with movies while in college. He made a number of short films, one of them being The Garden Party[4] (1973), based on the short story by Katherine Mansfield. The film starred Jessica Harper, Beatrice Straight, and Tracey Walter. In a 2020 interview Sholder declared that The Garden Party shows "the director I wanted to be, instead of where fate has taken me."[5]

After graduating college, Sholder moved to New York City, with plans of becoming an editor. Through a mutual friend, he met Robert Shaye of New Line, for whom he edited trailers, foreign films, and title sequences on a regular basis. After Friday the 13th had become a hit, New Line was looking to make its own horror movie. Sholder then came up with the idea of Alone in the Dark, which he wrote and directed. In a 2020 interview, Sholder said: "Bob [Shaye] trusted me with the film, because I was an editor and he knew I would get all the pieces. Whether the pieces would be any good, who knows? But at least he knew he would have a film."[5]

Sholder went on to make A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge for New Line, which was a commercial success. He got offered "about every horror script in Hollywood", as he tells it in a 2020 interview. But Sholder did not want to do any more horror movies. New Line offered him The Hidden, a hybrid of Cop movie, Action, and Sci-Fi. The Hidden proved that Sholder had a flair for action movies. Although it was not a commercial success, it had been a calling card for Sholder. As he said in an interview: "It tested through the roof, like it was gonna be a huge hit. (...) But the movie never broke through. Everybody in Hollywood loved it. I was a hot director for about six months. (...) Then things started to cool down and I knew I had to do a movie."[5] That's when Sholder accepted an offer from Universal to make Renegades.

• Jack Sholder at IMDb