Preston Sturges

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Preston Sturges (born August 29, 1898 in Chicago , Illinois , † August 6, 1959 in New York ; actually Edmund Preston Biden ) was an American screenwriter and director . He was best known as the director of screwball comedies such as The Wrong Player , Breathless to Florida and Sullivan's Travels . His screenplay for The Great McGinty won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 1941 Academy Awards .

Life

Sturges was raised to wealthy parents in France, Germany and Switzerland. At the age of 16 he already became a manager in a branch of his mother's cosmetics company in Deauville . When the war broke out, he returned to America, where he returned to his mother's company after serving as a soldier. Among other things, he invented a kiss-proof lipstick that helped the company make big profits. He began writing screenplays for Broadway shows in the mid-1920s and had the biggest hit of the 1929-30 theater season with Strictly Dishonorable . The play about an ambitious young girl was filmed in 1931 with Sidney Fox and in 1951 with Janet Leigh . Sturges wrote his first film scripts in 1930 for two Paramount films that were shot in New York's Astoria Studios: The Big Pond with Claudette Colbert and Fast and Loose with Miriam Hopkins and Carole Lombard . After a few Broadway flops, he signed a lucrative scriptwriting contract with Universal in 1933 and moved to Hollywood . He wrote u. a. the scripts for The Power and the Glory , a film that experimented with flashbacks and flashbacks as early as 1933, years before Citizen Kane , and for two films by Mitchell Leisen : the screwball comedy Mein Leben in Luxus from 1937 with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland and The Unforgettable Christmas Night , which came out in theaters in 1940 with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in the lead roles.

In 1940, Sturges decided to direct himself and achieved that goal by letting Paramount get his latest script for just $ 10. The political satire The Great McGinty received critical acclaim and earned him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Films such as The Cardsharp , Sullivan's Travels , Breathless to Florida and Sensation in Morgan's Creek established Sturges as a recognized screenwriter and innovative director. The films from Sturge's Paramount phase are characterized by sharp dialogues, closely observed scenes and an occasionally disrespectful joke that occasionally goes cynical. He was known for employing a permanent cast of supporting actors who repeatedly took on roles in his productions, most notably William Demarest . Other members of the group included a. Robert Warwick , Jimmy Conlin , Robert Greig , Franklin Pangborn , Georgia Caine , Arthur Hoyt , Torben Meyer and Victor Potel . Despite all his success, Sturges clashed with the studio bosses non-stop. Eventually there was a dispute with the studio about The Great Moment, which was filmed in 1942 . In this biography , Joel McCrea can be seen as William Thomas Green Morton , the pioneer of the use of ether . Paramount did not bring the film, like the already wacky comedies Sensation in Morgan's Creek and Heil the Victorious Hero, to the cinemas until several months later. After the studio made extensive cuts to The Great Moment without Sturges' consent, Sturges finally left the studio in 1943.

Sturges accepted an offer from Howard Hughes . The privilege of greater artistic freedom turned out to be a problem while working on Crazy Wednesday in 1947: Sturges went over budget and schedule, also because he could not reconcile his artistic ideas with those of the lead actor Harold Lloyd . In the end, there was another commercial flop. He fared no better with his next two films for 20th Century Fox : Both the black comedy Die Ungetreue , which was released in 1948 with Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell , and the western comedy The Beautiful Blonde, specially tailored for the talents of Betty Grable from Bashful Bend fell through with critics and audiences alike. This ended the active career of Preston Sturges. Years later, he tried to revive his career in France, but his last film, The Diary of Mister Thompson , went without any response in 1955. Preston Sturges died on August 6, 1959 after a heart attack at the Algonquin Hotel . There he was writing his autobiography, which, ironically, he had intended to be called The Events Leading Up To My Death . His widow published the revised manuscript as a book in 1990 under the title Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges .

Filmography

Director

Scriptwriter only

producer

Awards

Oscar / Best Original Screenplay

literature

  • Preston Sturges: Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges. His Life in His Words. Adapted and edited by Sandy Sturges. Simon & Schuster, New York NY 1990, ISBN 0-671-67929-5
  • James Curtis: Between Flops. A Biography of Preston Sturges. Limelight, New York NY 1991, ISBN 0-87910-026-5 .
  • Diane Jacobs: Christmas in July. The Life and Art of Preston Sturges. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1992, ISBN 0-520-07926-4 .

Film documentaries

  • Preston Sturges - portrait of a Hollywood director . German TV documentary by Hans C. Blumenberg from 1970

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Sturges, Preston
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Biden, Edmund Preston (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American screenwriter and director
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois , USA
DATE OF DEATH August 6, 1959
Place of death New York , New York , USA