Television and film director Alex Grasshoff died of 5 April 2008 of complications from bypass surgery on his leg. Born 10 December 1928 in Boston, Massachusetts, he will probably be remembered for winning an Academy Award in 1969 and then being forced to return it.
He was nominated for the 1969 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary for Young Americans (which he wrote, directed, and produced), and was declared the winner. The film chronicled the adventures of the Young Americans singing group on its cross-country summer bus tour. A few weeks after the award ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences discovered the film had first been shown in a theater in October 1967, which made it ineligible. Grasshoff’s wife, Madilyn Clark Grasshoff (who announced his death) said Academy President Gregory Peck personally called her husband and his co-producer, Robert Cohn, “and they had a big to-do over it. What happened was, it was a trial sneak preview in some little town in, like, North Carolina,” she said. “I don’t know why they didn’t fight it, because it was not released.”
Academy Awards historian Robert Osborne said it was “the first time that an Academy Award has been presented to somebody and celebrated and days after has been collected and taken back.”
The first runner-up film, Journey Into Self, was declared the official Oscar winner for best feature documentary a month after the awards ceremony.
Grasshoff was also nominated for Oscars in the same category in 1967 for The Really Big Family and in 1974 for Journey to the Outer Limits.
Grasshoff’s genre directing credits include: The Last Dinosaur (1977), Crackle of Death (1976), and three episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974).
Grasshoff attended what was then Tufts College and USC, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in cinema in 1953. He started his Hollywood career in the mail room at Paramount in 1951, and later became an assistant editor and then an editor at the studio.