The film industry is mourning the loss of Bob Clark — the famed director of Porky’s and A Christmas Story — who, along with his son Ariel, was killed in a car crash near Los Angeles on Wednesday. He was 66. Clark, whose other credits include Murder by Decree (1979), Loose Cannons (1990) and Baby Geniuses (1999), was killed when his car was reportedly struck head-on by a drunk driver.

Clark was in preproduction on a remake of his 1972 horror film Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and, according to one source, was set to meet with director and big fan Quentin Tarantino, who had expressed interest in Children. The two had crossed paths at recent events promoting Tarantino’s Grindhouse. The future of the remake remains vague.

Clark’s death is a ‘tragic loss,’ says producer and longtime collaborator Victor Solnicki. The pair met in 1973 and went on to make the seminal slasher flick Black Christmas, a remake of which came out last year, and in which they were also both involved.

‘He’s been a huge influence in virtually creating two genres,’ Solnicki tells Playback Daily. ‘Black Christmas changed the whole direction of horror films, and with Porky’s, he started the round of broad youth-oriented comedies like the American Pie franchise.’

Producer Don Carmody fondly remembers meeting the director in 1979, when Clark approached him to help finance Porky’s, a raunchy comedy about teenagers in the 1950s who chase girls while running afoul of the owner of the local watering hole.

‘My initial reaction when I read the script was ‘We couldn’t make a movie out of this!’ But on sober reflection I thought that we should make a movie like this because no one’s ever seen anything like it,’ says Carmody on the phone from Montreal, where he is shooting the murder mystery White Out.

Although recently surpassed by Bon Cop, Bad Cop at the domestic box office, Porky’s, which was released in 1982, remains Canada’s all-time biggest success at the North American till, ringing in US$111 million, according to Variety.

The following year brought the Toronto-shot A Christmas Story, which stars Peter Billingsley as a young boy in the 1940s who wants Santa to bring him a Red Ryder B-B gun. The film has become a perennial Yuletide favorite.

Clark, born in the U.S., lived in Toronto for 12 years before moving to Los Angeles, though he remained a member of the Directors Guild of Canada.

DGC president Allan Goluboff, who worked as an assistant director on several of Clark’s films, recalls, ‘He was a sweet, charming man who had a deep love for making entertaining films.’