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Preston Sturges

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Preston Sturges (August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959), originally Edmund Preston Biden, was a celebrated screenwriter and director born in Chicago.

Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic, mature, and ahead of its time, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for one of Sturges' actors to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene. A love scene between Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve was enlivened by a horse, who repeatedly poked his nose into Fonda's head.

He is often credited as the first writer to direct his own script, but this is untrue. Many major directors such as Frank Capra and Howard Hawks preceded Sturges in making the leap from writing to directing. However, Sturges may have been the first to be promoted as such by the studios for publicity. Famously, he supposedly sold his screenplay for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $1, in exchange for the director's job.

Contents

Biography

Early Life

His parents were Mary Estelle Dempsey and travelling salesman Edmund Biden. When Sturges was three, his eccentric mother left America for Paris to pursue a singing career. There she anulled her marriage with Preston's father. Returning to America, Dempsey met her third husband, the wealthy stockbroker Solomon Sturges, who then adopted Preston in 1902. According to biographers, Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism." His mother. ultimately Mary Desti in her fourth marriage, was famous for her friendship with Isadora Duncan.

As a young man, Preston Sturges bounced back and forth between Europe and the States. In 1916 he worked as a runner for New York stock brokers, a position available through Solomon Sturges. The next year Preston enlisted in the Air Service and graduated as a lieutenant from Camp Dick in Texas. While at camp Preston published "Three Hundred Words of Humor," his first work, in the camp newspaper. Returning from camp, Sturges picked up a managing position at the Desti Emporium in New York, a store owned by his mother's fourth husband. He spent eight years (1919-1927) there, until he married the first of his four wives, Estelle De Wolfe.

From Broadway to Hollywood

In 1928, Sturges' first produced play, The Guinea Pig, opened in Massachusetts. A success, it moved to Broadway the following year, a turning point in Sturges' career. 1929 also saw Sturges' second play, the smash Strictly Dishonorable. This attracted interest from Hollywood, and Sturges had written his first screenplays for Paramount by the end of the year.

Several Sturges stage plays were produced from 1930-1932, but none were hits. By the end of the year, he was working more in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, operating from short contract to short contract, for studios like Universal, MGM and Columbia. He also sold his original screenplay for The Power and the Glory to Fox, where it was filmed as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The film told the story of a self-involved financier via a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, and was an acknowledged source of inspiration for the screenwriters of Citizen Kane.

For the remainder of the 1930s, Sturges operated under the strict auspices of the studio system, working on a string of scripts, some of which were shelved. This experience built his resolve to take control of his own projects, which he finally accomplished in 1939 by trading his screenplay for The Great McGinty (written six years earlier) in exchange for the chance to direct it.

Screenwriting Heights

He won the first Academy Award ever given for Writing Original Screenplay for the McGinty script. Perhaps more impressively, Sturges received two screenwriting Oscar nominations in the same year, for 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

Though he enjoyed a 30-year Hollywood career, the greatest of Sturges' comedies were filmed in a furious 5-year burst of activity. One of them, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, was literally being written by Sturges at night even as the production was being filmed in the daytime; the cast and crew were rarely more than 10 pages ahead of Sturges the screenwriter. Half a century later, that movie was one of four Sturges' films to be chosen among the American Film Institute's 100 funniest, along with The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story. Their combination of sentiment and cynicism has kept them fresh for today's audiences.

Sturges liked to reuse many of the same character actors, such as William Demarest, Byron Foulger, Victor Potel, Robert Grieg, Jimmy Conlin, Charles R. Moore, Robert Warwick, or Franklin Pangborn, giving him what amounted to a regular troupe even within the studio system.

Home Life

Sturges was married four times. His wives were: Estelle deWolfe Mudge, married 1923, divorced 1927; Eleanor Hutton (a daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post Hutton), eloped 1930, annulled 1932; Louise Sargent Tevis, married 1938, divorced 1947; Anne Nagle (Sandy), married 1951 - 1959.

He died in New York from a heart attack, and was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. His book "Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words" was published in 1990 by Simon & Schuster. (ISBN 0671679295)

Examples of Sturges dialogue

Fred MacMurray: "You know that's called arson." Barbara Stanwyck: "I thought that was when you bit somebody?"

William Demarest: "If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!"

Barbara Stanwyck: "I need him like the axe needs the turkey."

Charles Coburn: "Don't be vulgar, Jane. Let us be crooked, but never common."

Joel McCrea: "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan."

(studio executives, arguing over a movie) Robert Warwick: "It died in Pittsburgh." Porter Hall: "Like a dog!" Joel McCrea: "Aw, what do they know in Pittsburgh?" Porter Hall: "They know what they like." Joel McCrea: "If they knew what they liked, they wouldn't live in Pittsburgh!"

Rudy Vallee: "That's one of the tragedies of this life, that the men who are most in need of a beating are always enormous."

Rudy Vallee: "Chivalry is not only dead, it's decomposed."

Mary Astor: "I'd marry Captain McGloo tomorrow, even with that name." Rudy Vallee: "And divorce him the next month." Mary Astor: "Nothing is permanent in this world. Except for Roosevelt."

Claudette Colbert: "You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything."

William Demarest: "Listen, zipper-puss. Someday they're just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else. The mystery of Morgan's Creek."

William Demarest: "The trouble with kids is they always figure they're smarter than their parents. Never stop to think if their old man could get by for fifty years and feed 'em and clothe 'em, he maybe had something up here to get by with. Things that seem like brain twisters to you might be very simple for him."

Diana Lynn: "If you don't mind my mentioning it, Father, I think you have a mind like a swamp."

William Demarest: "It's an honor to meet you, kid. What's your name?" Eddie Bracken: "Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith. Go ahead and laugh." William Demarest: "That ain't anything to laugh at to anyone who knows anything. I guess you never got to know your father very well, eh?" Eddie Bracken: "Well, not exactly, as he fell the day I was born." William Demarest: "That's right. It's hard to realize. He was a fine-looking fellow. He didn't look anything like you at all."

(after the news that the town plans to build a statue of Bracken, the fraudulent war hero) Eddie Bracken: "What do I do now?" William Demarest: "Well, you just let it blow over." Eddie Bracken: "Did you ever see a statue blow over?" William Demarest: "I tell you it'll all blow over. Everything is perfect... except for a couple of details." Eddie Bracken: "They hang people for a couple of details!"

Elizabeth Patterson: "Well, that's the war for you. It's always hard on women. Either they take your men away and never send them back at all, or they send them back unexpectedly just to embarrass you. No consideration at all."

Feature-films filmography

Published screenplays

Awards

External links

 

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