W. D. Richter
Film director, producer, screenwriter
Walter Duch Richter (born December 7, 1945) is an American screenwriter, film director and film producer. He is best known for adapting Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directing The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and co-writing Big Trouble in Little China.
Biography
Richter graduated from Dartmouth College and attended USC Film School. He began script writing for Hollywood in the 1970s. He wrote the comedy Slither (1973), followed by two similarly styled comedies, Peeper (1975) and Nickelodeon (1976). He branched into other genres starting with the 1970s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
He wrote scripts throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 1980s, Richter formed his own production company (with producer Neil Canton), Canton/Richter, and directed The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. The film did poorly at the box office, and the company ended.
In 1981, he wrote a screenplay based on Eric Van Lustbader's novel The Ninja for Irvin Kershner to direct with Richard Zanuck and David Brown and 20th Century Fox to produce, which ultimately never got made.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “W. D. Richter” as film director, producer, screenwriter. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as film director, producer, screenwriter. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1300032. VIAF identifies the subject as 107149942. The Library of Congress control number is no99054553. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1973, 1975 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “W. D. Richter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.