Preston Sturges

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Preston Sturges (born Edmund Preston Biden, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film producer.

He received the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the film The Great McGinty in 1941, his first of three nominations in the category. Despite the farcical times, the Sturges took the screwball comedy style of the 1930s to a new degree, with writing dialogue that today is often playful, mature, and ahead of its time.

It is not unprecedented for a Sturges character to produce an exquisitely turned word and then descend into an intricate pratfall within the same setting. Prior to Sturges, other Hollywood celebrities (such as Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Frank Capra) had written scripts from scratch, but Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood celebrity to achieve success as a screenwriter and then shift into directing his own scripts, at a time when those roles were separate.

In exchange for being allowed to direct the film, Sturges told the tale about The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $1.

Early life

Sturges was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Mary Dempsey (later known as Mary Demise or Mary D'Este) and travelling salesman Edmund C. Biden. Catherine Campbell Smyth and Dominick d'Este Dempsey's maternal grandparents immigrated from Ireland, and his father was of English descent, and his father was of English descent.

When Sturges was three years old, his eccentric mother left America to pursue a singing career in Paris, where she ended her marriage with Preston's father. Dempsey's third husband, wealthy stockbroker Solomon Sturges, who adopted Preston in 1902, was returning to America. Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism," according to biographers. Isadora Duncan's close friendship was included in this series, as the young Sturges would often travel from country to country with Duncan's dance troupe. Mary also had a passion with Aleister Crowley and collaborated with him on his magnum opus Magick. Sturges bounced back and forth between Europe and the United States as a young man. As Sturges spent a majority of his childhood and youth in France, he became fluent in French and a Francophile who still thinks of France as his "second home."

He began working as a runner for New York stock brokers in 1916, a position he gained through Solomon Sturges. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Service and graduated as a lieutenant from Camp Dick, Texas, but no one saw action. Sturges wrote "Three Words of Humor," which was published in the camp newspaper, becoming his first published work while at camp. Sturges, who returned from camp, took over a managing position at the Desti Emporium in New York, a store owned by his mother's fourth husband. He lived eight years (191919–1927) there before marrying Estelle De Wolfe, the first of his four wives.

Personal life

Sturges married four times and had three children:

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Career

In 1928, Sturges appeared in Hotbed, Paul Osborn's short-lived play, and Sturges' first-produced play, The Guinea Pig, opened in Massachusetts. The performance was a hit, and Sturges brought it to Broadway the next year, a turning point in his career. The opening of Sturges' second play, Strictly Dishonest, occurred the same year. The play lasted for sixteen months and gained Sturges over $300,000, which was a huge amount at the time. It attracted celebrity, and by the year's end, Sturges was writing for Paramount.

Three other Sturges stage performances were produced from 1930 to 1932, one of which was a musical, but no of them were successful. By the end of the year, he was more active in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, on short notices for Universal, MGM, and Columbia studios. He also sold his original screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933) to Fox, where it was also shot as a Spencer Tracy vehicle. The film told the tale of a self-involved financier via a sequence of flashbacks and flashforwards, and was a consistent source of inspiration for Citizen Kane's screenwriters. Jesse Lasky, a Fox writer, had been able to customarily pass Sturges' screenplay along to other writers for rewriting, but "it was the most polished script I'd ever seen," said Fox producer Jesse Lasky. Imagine a writer accepting a script from an author and not being able to make one change." Lasky earned more than $7,000 than 7% of the company's revenues over $17,500. It was a then-unprecedented contract for a screenwriter that instantly lifted Sturges' fame in Hollywood, but the lucrative contract as well as impressed many. "The film made a lot of enemies," Sturges later remembered. At the time, writers, like pianist movers, worked in teams, like pianist movers. My first solo script was considered a serious threat to the profession."

Sturges worked under strict auspices of the studio system for the remainder of the 1930s, some of which were shelved, others with screen credit and others not. Although he was receiving a paycheck and $2,500 a week, he was dissatisfied with the way directors were treating his dialogue, and he promised to take creative control of his own projects. He attained this feat in 1939 by transferring his screenplay for The Great McGinty (written six years ago) to Paragua in exchange for the opportunity to direct it. According to Paramount, the rare arrangement was part of the film's publicity, Sturges had only been paid ten dollars. Sturges' success paved the way for similar deals for writers such as Billy Wilder and John Huston. "It's taken me eight years to achieve what I wanted," Sturges said. But now, if I don't run out of ideas – and I won't – we'll have some amusement. There are some fantastic pictures to be made, and I will make some of them if God willing.

For The Great McGinty, Sturges received the first-ever Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay. He has also been nominated for two screenwriting Academy Awards in the same year for 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero and Morgan's Creek, a feat that has been matched by Frank Butler, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. (Eleven screenplays were considered in the second Academy Awards, two by Bess Meredyth, two by Tom Barry, two by Hanns Kräly, and four by Elliott J. (Crimson) Clawson (Clawson)

Despite his thirty-year Hollywood career, Sturges' greatest comedies were shot in a tumultuous five-year boom from 1939 to 1944, during which he appeared on The Great McGinty, The Grace of Morgan's Creek, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero, for each of whom he appeared as both screenplay writer and director. Four of these – The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and Morgan's Creek – were selected by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 funniest American films half a century ago – are among the 100 best American films.

According to Ephraim Katz, Sturges films "parodied with pungent wit various aspects of American life, from politics and advertising to sex and hero worship." They were identified by their verbal wit, opportune comedic timing, and eccentric, bizarre, oddly funny camo characterizations." "Sturges have consistently said that with the right combination of luck, bluff, and fraud, the best boob could rise to the top." "The touchstone of Preston Sturges' screenwriting is in the attention paid to the play and density of verbal language," and "establishes the level of eloquence as one of poetry," the critic writes, "not insignificantly" spoken with scandalous indifference.

"A lowbrow aristocrat, a melancholy wise man," Sturges' rich writing style has been described as that of "a lowbrow aristocrat, a melancholy wise." His scripts were almost incapable to produce a single mood. The film's theme of patriotism and service is enhanced by the film's history of lies, murders, and embarrassment. This attitude could be conveyed in a single line of dialogue, as in The Lady Eve, when Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) promises revenge on Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) vows revenge, saying, "I need him like the axe needs the turkey."

Film scholars such as Alessandro Pirolini have also stated that Sturges' cinemas expected more experimental narratives by contemporary writers such as Joel and Ethan Coen, Robert Zemeckis, and Woody Allen, as well as prolific The Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, were able to defyne and narrative schemata and push the boundaries and conventions of their genre to the point of revealing them to the viewer. See for example the demise of standard timelines in films like The Power and the Glory, The Great McGinty, or even the way an obviously classical tale, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), enters the realm of multiple and hypothetical narratives.

Manny Farber, a writer for The Palm Beach Story in 1942, wrote: "In his review of The Palm Beach Story, writer Manny Farber wrote: "In 1942."

These films didn't necessarily go well. Even as the film was being shot in the daytime, Morgan's Creek was being written by Sturges at night, and Sturges' screenwriter was rarely more than ten pages ahead of the cast and crew.

Despite the Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek's success, conflict with Paraphrasedoutput's studio bosses has grown. Buddy DeSylva, the executive producer, never really trusted his script writer-director, was skeptical (and perhaps jealous) of the freedom Sturges enjoyed on his projects. Sturges' tendency to repurpose several of the same character actors in his films, resulting in what amounts to a regular troupe he could call upon within the studio system. The audience was concerned that the audience would tire of seeing the same faces in Sturges productions repeatedly. The producer, on the other hand, was adamant, saying, "[T]hese little players who contributed so much to my first hits had the right to work in my subsequent photographs." Sturges' writing and directing of these actors resulted in a succession of "self-expressive cameos of radical individualism," which film critic Andrew Sarris later described as "self-expressive cameos of violent individualism."

George Anderson, Al Bridge, Georgia Caine, Henry Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, Jimmy Conlin, Robert Dudley, Robert Dudley, John Greig, Robert Dudley, Margaret Harford, John Moore, George Murray, Herbert Moore, George Meyer, George Moore, Arthur Moore, J. Farrell, George Smith, Charles R. Moore, Torben Meyer, George Meyer, William Corbett, James Stewart, Ferdinand Bannen, Max Wagner, Robert Warwick, Benjamin devijamma In addition, Sturges re-used other actors, including Sig Arno, Luis Alberni, Eric Blore, Porter Hall, and Raymond Walburn, as well as actors such as Joel McCrea and Rudy Vallee, who appeared in three films with Sturges and Eddie Bracken, who appeared in two of them.

Sturges and Paramount's long-running rivalry came to an end as the end of his employment came to an end. In 1942 and 1942, he had shot The Great Moment and The Conquering Hero, but In 1943, He had shot The Great Moment and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero, but In 1943, but But But He had shot The Great Moment and The Conquering Hero, but In 1942 and Hail the Conquering Hero was shot of The Great Moment of Morgan's Creek, but He had been suffering from a, but Paragraph's, but Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, and The Great Moment and The Conquering Hero, but Paraphrasedy of the Conquering Hero, but Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedising Hero, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, a, but Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, He's, but Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedize, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, but Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, he's, Paraphrasedout, Paraphrasedout, He had shot of Morgan's Creek, but In 1943, but In 1942 and The Great Moment and The Great Moment and The Great Moment and the Conquering Hero, but In 1942 and The Conquering Hero, In 1943, In 1942, In 1943, In 1942, but Paragraph "Conquering Hero" was plaguedoutput: Paraphrasedit of Film In 1942, but Paragraph, but Paraphrasedout, In 1943, In 1942 and Hail, but He had shot and The Great Moment and The Great Moment and Hail defo, but Paraphrasedit of Films, In 1943, but In 1942, but In fact, some of the studio's finished films were sold to United Artists, who wanted films to be distributed. Since he was their lead actor at the time, the studio didn't announce Sturges' three films immediately, they did not announce them immediately.

Studio heads expressed reservations about them, as did the Breen Office's censors. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was released with only minor changes, but DeSylva took The Great Moment and Hail the Conquering Hero from his custody, but the Great Moment and the Conquering Hero were taken out of his sight and tinkered with by DeSylva. When the newly redesigned Hail the Conquering Hero had a disastrous preview, Paramount granted Sturges, who had left the studio at that time, to return and fix the film. Sturges did some rewriting, shot some new scenes, and re-edited the film back to his original version, but not for money. However, he was unable to save The Great Moment. During this period, the historical biography of the dentist who discovered the use of ether for anesthesia ended up being Sturges' only flop. More importantly, it heralded the start of a downturn in which Sturges did not fully recover.

Preston Sturges was a natural performer who fully understood his own worth. He had invested in entrepreneurial ventures, like an engineering firm, and The Players, a famous restaurant and nightclub on 8225 Sunset Boulevard, which were both net losses. At one time, he was the third highest-paid man in America, producing, writing, directing, and a slew of other Hollywood ventures.

Howard Hughes, a millionaire who had formed a friendship with Sturges, wanted to bankroll him as an independent filmmaker. Sturges and Hughes formed California Pictures, a company that appeared in early 1944. The agreement ended up as a major wage cut for Sturges, but it established him as a writer-producer-director, the only one in Hollywood other than Charles Chaplin, and one of just four in the world, along with England's No.l Coward and France's René Clair. His celebrity drew widespread adoration and apprehension among his Hollywood peers.

However, this career peak came at the beginning of Sturges' professional decline, as Hughes was also a volatile and mercurial partner. Although the startup California Pictures was being designed and structured, it was three years before Sturges' next release. When it was announced, the film, a Harold Lloyd vehicle named The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), for which Sturges had coaxed the silent film icon out of retirement, was poorly received and far behind schedule. Hughes, who had promised not to interfere in the film's development, stepped in and pulled the film from circulation in order to re-edit it, taking nearly four years to do so. The retitled Mad Wednesday, which was owned by Hughes at the time, was no more lucrative than Sturges' original version.

In the meantime, California Pictures had completed Vendetta, a sequel to another film. Sturges had written the script at Hughes' behest as a weapon for Hughes' protégé, Faith Domergue. Max Ophüls was hired to direct, but Hughes demanded that Sturges fire Ophüls and take over the direction himself after only a few days of filming. Sturges himself was fired or laid off seven weeks later (accounts differ). After just one complete picture, the two iconoclasts' promising collaboration was ended. "When Mr. Hughes made suggestions with which I disagreed, I dismissed them as he had a legitimate right to do so." He remembered that he had the opportunity to take over the company when I turned down the last one. So I left."

These further flops, disappointments, and setbacks followed The Great Moment's demise, tarnishing the golden boy of Hollywood's once-shining.

Sturges was left adrift in work. He landed at Fox, where he wrote, directed, and produced two films after accepting Darryl Zanuck's invitation. Unfaithfully Yours (1948), the first attempt, was not immediately accepted by either reviewers or the public, although its critical reputation has since increased. However, Sturges' second Fox film, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), was the first serious flop in actor Betty Grable's career, and he was not on his own. He built a theater at his Players restaurant, but the venture didn't turn out.

Sturges continued to write over the next five years, but some of the initiatives were underfunded or even launched, and those that emerged did not have the same success as his previous triumphs. Make a Wish, Abe Burrows' 1951 Broadway musical, underwent extensive rewrite and ran for just a few months. Carnival in Flanders, a Broadway show that Sturges wrote and directed in 1953, has ended after six performances.

In Hollywood, where his clout had no success, the sturges were having no luck. The Millionaires' request, Katharine Hepburn, who appeared in the George Bernard Shaw play in 1952, persuaded Sturges to change the script and direct. But she could not get a single Hollywood studio to support the project.

The Players nightclub and other assets were purchased by a 1953 lien by the Internal Revenue Service, with whom he had been having tax difficulties. "I had so much for so long, it's only natural for the pendulum to swing the other way for a while, and I can't and won't complain." Sturges wrote a brave public face on the situation, saying, "I have so much to be grateful for." However, his drinking became heavy, and his marriage and some of his friendships began to deteriorate.

Sturges began spending more time in Europe as a young man. When Les Carnets du Major Thompson, a popular French novel, was his last directorial attempt. The film was released in France in 1955 and two years later in the United States under the heading The French Are a Funny Race. It didn't succeed in either critics or the audience.

In the Paramount all-star extravaganza Star Spangled Rhythm, Sturges made four brief onscreen appearances throughout his career: in two of his own films, Christmas in July and Sullivan's Travels, and in the years of his decline in the Bob Hope comedy Paris Holiday, which was shot in France and would be his last film he worked on, he appeared in four of his performances. Sturges had been a writer on one of Hope's oldest film hits, Never Say Die, two decades ago.

In 1959, Sturges summed up his career:

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