Steve Carver, Director of Lone Wolf McQuade and Big Bad Mama, Dies at 75

Steve Carver, a director of action films whose portfolio included An Eye for an Eye and Lone Wolf McQuade, both starring Chuck Norris, and Big Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson, has died. He was 75.

Carver died Friday of a heart attack in Los Angeles, writer-producer Rob Word told The Hollywood Reporter.

Carver's first feature was Pam Grier's The Arena (1974), a gladiator movie set in ancient Rome that marked his initial collaboration with producer Roger Corman, and he also guided Ben Gazzara in Capone (1975), Warren Oates and Ken Norton in Drum (1976) and Lee Majors in Steel (1979).

Carver's first love was photography, and a 2019 book he and C. Courtney Joyner co-authored, Western Portraits: The Unsung Heroes and Villains of the Silver Screen, featured beautiful shots of Robert Forster, Karl Malden, L.Q. Jones, Richard Roundtree, David Carradine, Bo Hopkins, Clu Gulager, Jan-Michael Vincent and many others.

Born in Brooklyn on April 5, 1945, Carver attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, the University of Buffalo and Cornell University before earning his master's from Washington University in St. Louis.

An exhibition of his photographs led him to work as a freelancer for such publications as Architectural Digest and National Geographic and as a staffer for United Press International.

Carver came to Los Angeles in 1970 to study filmmaking at the American Film Institute, where he directed and produced a 27-minute version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. He then had an apprenticeship with the DGA.

Carver also collaborated with Corman on Big Bad Mama (1974) and Capone and with composer Ennio Morricone on The Arena and Lone Wolf McQuade (1983). He visited with Word to chat about the making of McQuade and his career in 2018.

His résumé also included Fast Charlie … the Moonbeam Rider (1979), starring Carradine and Brenda Vaccaro, and Bulletproof (1987), starring Gary Busey.

In 1995, Carver opened The Darkroom, a photographic lab in Venice where he developed archival techniques to preserve historic images for private collectors and museums and taught traditional printing techniques.

Survivors include a son.

Ryan White explains the cloak-and-dagger-style process he and his team went through to obtain revealing video of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s half-brother: "Making a film about a crime like that, you're always a little paranoid of, 'Are you being watched?'"

"I am not exaggerating when I say I really felt like I was living in a spy movie," says filmmaker Ryan White of crafting Assassins, the documentary exploring the 2017 murder of Kim Jong-nam — the elder half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — at the hands of two young women, who insisted they believed they were participating in a prank show and duped into rubbing a lethal chemical weapon in the victim's eyes.

Crucial to Assassins' storytelling is an abundance of revealing closed-circuit television footage casting a penetrating light on the women's claims. "There would have been no film without the CCTV footage, and there definitely would not be a film making a case for their innocence," said White. "We tried everything to get it." The production was initially denied at every turn, from the Malaysian police and court system to the Kuala Lumpur airport where the assassination took place. Even the women's defense attorneys had no access to the footage.

Ultimately, however, White's team obtained stacks of DVDs — containing hundreds of hours of footage from multiple vantage points with no organization or identifiers — from a source he says he cannot reveal. "It wasn't the police," he explains, "so we had to be very careful and safe with the footage." Indeed, the files were uploaded to a burner computer separate from the production's central system in case they contained catastrophic malware after passing through multiple hands before reaching the filmmakers.

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Once assembled into a cohesive narrative over three months, the revelations were astonishing. "Eventually your eyes start to notice what's happening around the women, and we started to see different faces that were popping up multiple times," says producer Jessica Hargrave. Interpol and police files identified those faces as North Korean operatives, eerily and subtly orchestrating the women's actions. "Seeing these men who were watching over them to be sure that they did what they actually did was really chilling," she says.

"Once we put it all together, we started realizing, 'Holy shit, this corroborates everything that they're saying went down,' " says White, who admits the process of obtaining and scrutinizing the surveillance footage inspired dread and suspicion behind the scenes. "Making a film about a crime like that, you're always a little paranoid of, 'Are you being watched?' "