Preston Sturges (;"Sturges". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. born Edmund Preston Biden; August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, inventor, screenwriter, and film director.
He is credited as the first screenwriter to find success as a director. Prior to Sturges, other Hollywood directors (such as Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra) had directed films from their own scripts; however, Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood figure to establish success as a screenwriter and then move into directing his own scripts. He sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $10 in exchange for directing it. Anthony Lane writes that "To us, that seems old hat, one of the paths by which the ambitious get to run their own show, but back in 1940, when The Great McGinty came out, it was very new hat indeed; the opening credits proclaimed 'Written and directed by Preston Sturges,' and it was the first time in the history of talkies that the two passive verbs had appeared together onscreen. From that conjunction sprang a whole tradition of filmmaking: literate, spiky, defensive, markedly personal, and almost always funny." For that film, Sturges won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Sturges received Oscar nominations for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero (both 1944). He also wrote and directed The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels (both 1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), all appearing on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Laughs list.
His career is chronicled in Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer.
Early life
Sturges was born in Chicago to Mary Estelle Dempsey (later known as Mary Desti and Mary D'Esti), who was born in Quebec in 1871 and died in New York City in 1931, and the traveling salesman Edmund C. Biden (1871–1935). His father died of a heart attack after being arrested for issuing a bad check. His maternal grandparents, Catherine Campbell Smyth and Dominick d'Este Dempsey, were immigrants from Ireland and his father was of English descent.
When Sturges was two years old, his mother left America to pursue a singing career in Paris, where she annulled her marriage with Preston's father. Returning to America, Dempsey met her third husband, the wealthy stockbroker Solomon Sturges (1865–1940), who married her in 1901, and adopted Preston in 1902. According to biographers, Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism". This included her close friendship with Isadora Duncan. Mary also carried on a romantic affair with Aleister Crowley who wrote about her in his novel Moonchild, and she collaborated with him on his magnum opus Magick.The Magical World of Aleister Crowley, Francis King, 1977 As Mary Desti, she was the owner of Desti Beauty Products, a cosmetics firm and New York City studio which sold art objects, perfumes, and clothing. She wrote as Mary Desti (1929) The untold story: the life of Isadora Duncan, 1921-1927. via: archive.org
As a young man, Sturges bounced back and forth between the United States and Europe, where he would sometimes travel from country to country with Duncan's dance company. As Sturges spent much of his youth in France, he became fluent in French and a Francophile who always considered France his "second home".Viviani, Christiana "Hail the Conquering Auteur: Preston Sturges in La Revue du cinéma (1946–1949)" pages 280-292 from ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges edited by Jeff Jaeckle, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015 pages 280-281
In 1916, he worked as a runner for New York stock brokers, a position he obtained through Solomon Sturges. The next year, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Service, and graduated as a lieutenant from Camp Dick in Texas without seeing action. While at camp, Sturges wrote an essay, "Three Hundred Words of Humor", which was printed in the camp newspaper, becoming his first published work. Returning from camp, in 1919 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 there, until he married Estelle De Wolfe.
Sturges's 1928 turn to playwriting was accidental. While on a date with a young actress of certain renown, she informed Sturges that while she had pretended to find him witty and charming, she actually considered him a bore. "The only reason I'm going out with you, sir, is for the same reason that a scientist embraces a guinea pig; I just like to try my situations out on you to see how they turn out." She claimed that the dramatic research was for a play she was writing. Outraged, Sturges told her that if she could write a play, he could write a play, but that his would be better and run longer. Within two months, he had written his first play, The Guinea Pig, only to find out that she wasn't writing a play at all, and that she was surprised and flattered that he had taken her ravings so seriously.
Career
From Broadway to Hollywood In 1928, Sturges performed on Broadway in Hotbed, a short-lived play by Paul Osborn. Sturges' The Guinea Pig opened at the President Theatre on January 7, 1929, after first opening locally at The Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts; it was a turning point in his career. Also in 1928 Sturges's second play, the hit Strictly Dishonorable opened. Written in just six days, the play ran for sixteen months and earned Sturges over $300,000. It attracted interest from Hollywood, and Sturges was writing for Paramount by the end of the year.
Three other Sturges stage plays were produced from 1930 to 1932, one of them a musical, but none were hits. By the end of the year, he was working more in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, operating on short contracts, for Universal, MGM, and Columbia studios. He also sold his original screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933) to Fox, where it was filmed as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The film is about a self-involved financier and uses a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards. It is sometimes seen as being a precursor to Citizen Kane (1941). Fox producer Jesse Lasky had been prepared to customarily pass Sturges's screenplay along to other writers for rewriting, but said, "It was the most perfect script I'd ever seen... Imagine a producer accepting a script from an author and not being able to make one change." Lasky paid Sturges $17,500 plus 7% of the profits above $1 million. It was a then-unprecedented deal for a screenwriter, which instantly elevated Sturges's reputation in Hollywood—although the lucrative deal irritated as many as it impressed. Sturges recalled, "The film made a lot of enemies. Writers at that time worked in teams, like piano movers. And my first solo script was considered a distinct menace to the profession."
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, sometimes with screen credit and sometimes not. While he was highly paid, earning $2,500 a week, he was unhappy with the way directors were handling his dialogue, and he resolved to take creative control of his own projects. He accomplished this goal in 1939 by trading his screenplay for The Great McGinty (written six years earlier) to Paramount in exchange for the chance to direct it. Paramount promoted the unusual deal as part of the film's publicity, saying that Sturges had received just ten dollars.Sturges (1990) p.291 Sturges's success quickly paved the way for similar deals for such writer–directors as Billy Wilder and John Huston. Sturges said, "It's taken me eight years to reach what I wanted. But now, if I don't run out of ideas—and I won't—we'll have some fun. There are some wonderful pictures to be made, and God willing, I will make some of them."
In 1941, Sturges opened the Players, a three-story restaurant and nightclub, at 8225 Sunset Boulevard, across from the Chateau Marmont. with a drive-in on the ground floor and a French restaurant on the top floor with a revolving bandstand. Sturges worked on movies all day and then hung out all evening at the Players. His investments in entrepreneurial projects, such as Sturges engineering company, and the Players restaurant, were ongoing net losses. Despite being at one point, the third highest paid man in America, for writing, directing, producing, and numerous other Hollywood projects, he was often known to borrow money (from his stepfather, his studio, and others).
Screenwriting heights Sturges won the first-ever Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for The Great McGinty, at which time he was one of the highest paid men in Hollywood.Syme, Rachel (April 10, 2023) "The Profound Surfaces of Preston Sturges" The New Yorker He also received two screenwriting Academy Award nominations in the same year, for 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, a feat since matched by Frank Butler, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. (In the second Academy Awards, under a different nomination process, eleven screenplays were considered, including two by Bess Meredyth, two by Tom Barry, two by Hanns Kräly and four by Elliott J. Clawson.) F. Scott Fitzgerald, then in Hollywood, wrote "They let a certain writer here direct his own picture here, and he's made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon."
Although he had a thirty-year Hollywood career, Sturges's greatest comedies were filmed in a furious five-year burst of activity from 1939 to 1944, during which he turned out McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, for each of which he served as both writer and director.
Studio battles
Production on these films did not always go smoothly. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was being written by Sturges at night even as the production was being filmed in the daytime, and Sturges the screenwriter was rarely more than 10 pages ahead of the cast and crew.
Despite the box office success of The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, conflict with Paramount's studio bosses increased. In particular, executive producer Buddy DeSylva never really trusted his star writer-director and was wary (and arguably jealous) of the independence Sturges enjoyed on his projects. One of the sources of conflict was that Sturges liked to reuse many of the same character actors in his films, thus creating what amounted to a regular troupe he could call upon within the studio system. Paramount feared that the audience would tire of repeatedly seeing the same faces in Sturges productions. But the director was adamant, saying, "[T]hese little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures."Frankel, Mark "Hail the Conquering Hero" (TCM article) The way Sturges wrote and directed these actors created a succession of what Andrew Sarris later called "self-expressive cameos of aggressive individualism."