- Born
- Died
- Birth nameJoseph Benjamin Vasquez
- Born in the South Bronx, the son of two heroin addicts, Joseph Vazquez was 10 months old when his mother left him (and his two older brothers) to be raised by her mother (his father died of a drug overdose in 1985). When he was 12, he began making his own movies, using a relative's Super-8 camera. Awarded a filmmaking degree from City College of New York in 1983, Vazquez got a job in a film postproduction company, and in 1989 he put together his own film, The Bronx War (1991). It made the rounds of the film festivals and soon Vazquez was contacted by New Line Cinema. He showed them a script he had been working on for several years, and New Line agreed to finance and distribute the film, Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991). It was a success both critically and financially, and Vazquez' career as a filmmaker seemed to be launched. However, his already erratic behavior on set worsened when he was attacked one morning in the subway by a deranged derelict, who slashed his face with a knife. Vazquez had ambitions to be an actor as well as a director, and he believed that the knifing ended his acting career; according to cast and crew members, he took out his frustrations on them. His behavior after the film opened began to alienate people in the industry (at the New York premiere he made a speech in which he thanked the people of New York "because they have the best drugs") and he turned down so many projects that were offered to him that eventually the offers stopped coming. In 1994 he was offered a job in Puerto Rico directing Manhattan Merengue! (1995). Vazquez believed that the film was going to be a hit but it was never released and he became severely depressed. He moved to Hollywood, but his erratic behavior worsened to the point where one day he was taken to a county mental facility after being arrested while running naked through an apartment building. A psychiatrist diagnosed him as manic-depressive and recommended hospitalization, but Vazquez refused and signed himself out of the hospital. Believing himself to be Jesus Christ, he used the last of his money to rent a house in which he gathered a group of homeless people and prostitutes as his `family', and even managed to get some money together to begin shooting a film, but after a few days of filming the crew he hired deserted the project when he came on the set one day screaming and waving a loaded gun. He eventually left the house he was living in and moved in with his mother, whom he hadn't seen in decades and who was living in a small town near the Mexican border. His mental state deteriorated further and he was hospitalized several times, and on one of his stays it was discovered that he had AIDS. He died of complications from AIDS in a San Diego hospital on December 16, 1995.- IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com
- Was of Afro-Puerto Rican descent.
- In March 1995, Vasquez had started to direct a horror film he had written called "Devil in the Hellhouse", in which he planned to play a serial killer, with the help of producer Michael Spielberg, he managed to raise some money, and shot a few days worth of film before the project shut down, after the crew, shaken by Vasquez's manic bouts, deserted the set.
- He had turned down an offer to direct House Party 2 (1991).
- He had written the script for The House That Jack Built (2013) back in the early 1990s.
- He was slated to direct "Writing on the Wall", a screenplay by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, with George Jackson and Doug McHenry attached as producers.
- [on getting slashed by a homeless man]: In a nutshell, a guy came up to me, tried to steal a token from me and we had an argument that got really heated up, and the guy cut me with a knife. The thing that depresses me about it is, I was getting chauffeured around by the company and I could've had a car pick me up, but I felt like, oh, I'm getting a big head, Let me just get on the subway, let me be real. It was too real. And this was in Manhattan..I never had any problems in the Bronx.
- [on writing the script for Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991) in three days: It was real easy....All I had to do was figure out what was the order that it was gonna fall into. But so much of it was the stuff that was actually said. There are lines in there that friends of mine, they go, Oh, I remember, I used to say that all the time!
- on coming up with Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991): I had this idea for this film for a long while, but I never wrote it down, and I'm glad I waited, 'cause if I'd have made it back then, the film would have just been a good-time party movie, but now I'm outside of it and can see it for what it was, which was, hey, we had a good time but we were headed nowhere, we had so much tension beneath the surface. So it was good to have that objective view, writing about it at 27 rather than at 21.
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