about his film to students at Boston University. "Essentially, we saw it as a story with many comedic elements in a serious framework — a kind of black comedy or existential humor of which Dr. Strangelove is a prototype", he said. "We hoped people would take it on more than one level." The film was released on DVD in 2006 by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. "Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s screenplay is beautifully worked out, and the director, Noel Black, does a superb job of modulating the film's conflicting elements: the coming-of-age story and the thriller", Charles Taylor said in a New York Times review on the occasion of the film's DVD release, in 2006. Cover Me Babe and Jennifer on My Mind Black's next film, Cover Me Babe (1970), was about a film student who embraces the avant-garde. The film starred Sam Waterston, Sondra Locke and Robert Forster. Like Pretty Poison, Cover Me Babe was also released by 20th Century Fox. The subsequent film Black directed afterwards was Jennifer on My Mind (1971), and its screenplay was written by Erich Segal, who was known for his novel, Love Story. Both of these films were flops. "The gold-plated nail in my career coffin was pounded when, after the box-office failure of Pretty Poison, I accepted a dreadful project, Cover Me Babe, that never should have been made", Black remarked. "I reckoned that it was better to stay active than to wait for a project I believed in. That was a mistake. It was followed by another mistake, Jennifer on My Mind, one of the dozens of unsuccessful drug pictures at the time." 1970s television work "For five years after the two flops, I devoted myself to writing scripts", Black continued. "Finally in 1976, I decided to get back into directing through episodic television. The idea of it scared me because I had started in the film business at the top with my own feature." Black went on to write scripts and direct television shows like Kojak and Quincy, M.E. in the mid-1970s. He also directed Ron Howard in an adaptation of Sherwood Anderson's I'm a Fool, which served as a 1977 episode for the PBS series, The American Short Story. He also directed episodes of such other TV series as McCloud, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and Hawaii Five-O. Marianne/Mirrors, A Man, a Woman, and a Bank and Private School Black