Preston Sturges

Tom Sturges, Nick Smedley

Description

Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade, including films, plays, TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries, sketchbooks, correspondence, unpublished screenplays and more, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen, showing a master still at work – even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage. 

Foreword by Peter Bogdanovich

Preface by Nick Smedley 

 

Part I

The Preludes: The Brilliant Career of Preston Sturges, 1940–1949 — A Critical Survey of His Hollywood Films

1. Beginnings

2. The Emergence of a Genius

3. Sturges Triumphant

4. A Sputtering Flame: The Final Hollywood Films

5. Conclusion: The Brilliant Career of Preston Sturges

 

Part II

The Last Years of Preston Sturges, 1949–1959

Chapter 1: A Fallen Giant: Adjusting to the New, 1949–1950

Chapter 2: Back to the Future: Broadway and Paramount, 1951–1952

Chapter 3: Sturges’ Travels: Farewell to America, 1953

Chapter 4: The Millionairess and the Major: Sturges Returns to Paris, 1954

Chapter 5: Americans in Paris: Filming Major Thompson, 1955

Chapter 6: American Gangster: The Trials and Tribulations of Independent Film Production, 1956–1957

Chapter 7: Farcical Manoeuvres, 1957–1958 

Chapter 8: New York, New York: Public Hopes, Private Griefs, 1957

Chapter 9: For Better or For Worse: Marital Tensions, 1957–1958

Chapter 10: Sliding Towards the Brink, January–July 1958

Chapter 11: The Road to Despair, July–December 1958

Chapter 12: The Conquering Hero: Return to New York, January–March 1959

Chapter 13: Triumph over Pain: The Last Happy Months of Preston Sturges, March–August 1959

Chapter 14: The Events Have Led Up to His Death, August 1959 

 

Afterword by P. G. Sturges

Appendix 1: Fabulous Inventions 

Appendix 2: Story Ideas

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Popular Culture
• Nueva York
• USA
• Film director
• The Palm Beach Story
• The Millionairess
• Golden Age (disambiguation)
• The Great McGinty
• Paramount
• General officer
• The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
• The Lady Eve
• Sullivan's Travels
• History of film
• Gouverneur malgré lui
• Miracle au village
• Art
• General
• Cultural Studies
• États-Unis
• Paris
• Un c?ur pris au piège
• L'?cumène d'or
• Electronic
• Digital
• Broadway
• Frank Capra
• Paramount Pictures
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
• 20th Century Fox
• Film
• Hollywood
• New York
• France

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 21 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380255
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover art: Original self-portrait drawn by Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges papers, Collection 1114, UCLA Library Special Collections. Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Indexer: Carrie Giunta
Production manager: Faith Newcombe
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-992-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-026-2
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-025-5
Printed and bound by Short Run, UK.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) Licence. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Figure 1: Preston Sturges with his sons, Preston and Tom-Tom, Paris, 1957. Used with permission from the Tom and P. G. Sturges Collection.
Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Peter Bogdanovich
Preface by Nick Smedley
Part I
The Preludes: The Brilliant Career of Preston Sturges, 1940–1949 — A Critical Survey of His Hollywood Films
i. Beginnings
ii. The Emergence of a Genius
iii. Sturges Triumphant
iv. A Sputtering Flame: The Final Hollywood Films
v. Conclusion: The Brilliant Career of Preston Sturges
Part II
The Last Years of Preston Sturges, 1949–1959
Chapter 1: A Fallen Giant: Adjusting to the New, 1949–1950
Chapter 2: Back to the Future: Broadway and Paramount, 1951–1952
Chapter 3: Sturges’ Travels: Farewell to America, 1953
Chapter 4: The Millionairess and the Major: Sturges Returns to Paris, 1954
Chapter 5: Americans in Paris: Filming Major Thompson , 1955
Chapter 6: American Gangster: The Trials and Tribulations of Independent Film Production, 1956–1957
Chapter 7: Farcical Manoeuvres, 1957–1958
Chapter 8: New York, New York: Public Hopes, Private Griefs, 1957
Chapter 9: For Better or For Worse: Marital Tensions, 1957–1958
Chapter 10: Sliding Towards the Brink, January–July 1958
Chapter 11: The Road to Despair, July–December 1958
Chapter 12: The Conquering Hero: Return to New York, January–March 1959
Chapter 13: Triumph over Pain: The Last Happy Months of Preston Sturges, March–August 1959
Chapter 14: The Events Have Led Up to His Death, August 1959
Afterword by P. G. Sturges
Appendix 1: Fabulous Inventions
Appendix 2: Story Ideas
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgements

From Nick Smedley
I would like to express my deepest thanks to Tom Sturges for allowing me access to the family archives, for giving me the idea to write the book and for entertaining me so warmly during my visits to Los Angeles. And also for tolerating my many sarcastic and abusive emails. He has become a firm and wonderful friend. I would also like to thank Con and Sue Mallon for accommodating me so generously in their lovely apartment in Manhattan Beach during my research trip. Dr Sheldon Hall offered many insights and advice on matters both great and small, and his input has improved the book in all sorts of ways. I am grateful for his help. Thanks also to my publisher for once again supporting my writing. And, as ever, my deepest thanks and all my love are for Kate.
From Tom Sturges
Nick’s e-mail about the possibility of writing a book on my father came out of nowhere. My first thought was that there had already been seventeen books written on or about Preston Sturges, but that no one had ever focused on the last ten years of his life, after the fame had receded and the good times had come to an end. As a fulcrum, I told Nick that I had boxes of letters between my parents from that period as well as several diaries my father meticulously kept. Nick said he’d give it a try. The combination of these source materials and his own remarkable abilities allowed him to piece together a detailed and honest picture of a very complicated person. He revealed to me a man I never knew and had practically never met. So thank you, first, to Nick for allowing me to understand what was happening to my father in those final dizzying years, with a return to prosperity always just around the corner, and his boys always thousands of miles away.
Thank you to UCLA Special Collections, an amazing organization that maintains the highest standards for the Preston Sturges papers (as well as others, of course) – such that scholars, authors and other devotees can visit and actually hold the pages of original scripts and smell the ink of the typewriters that transformed Preston Sturges’ musings and stories into dialogue and characters.
Thank you to my beautiful Karen, my wife, my life, my love, always encouraging me to do great things.
Thank you to my three amazing sons, Thomas and Sam and Kian, for being a constant and searching reminder of what I’m doing here.
And thank you to my father. Not a day goes by without a thought of you and me and all we missed.
From Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges
Both of us would like to thank Peter Bogdanovich for contributing his elegant and insightful Foreword, and Francis Ford Coppola, James L. Brooks and Ron Shelton for their warm endorsements of the book, so freely given. We would also like to say a big thank you to our lovely and efficient editor at Intellect, Faith Newcombe.
Foreword by Peter Bogdanovich

Preston Sturges: As Good as It Gets
In our (as Gore Vidal put it) United States of Amnesia, it is not in the least surprising that one of the great geniuses of American film is virtually unknown today. And yet, look at The Lady Eve , or look at The Palm Beach Story , or that extraordinary ‘testament film’ (as the French would call it), his deeply moving and also hilarious tribute to laughter, Sullivan’s Travels , and tell me how could any cultured person not be aware of such living treasures?
Living, because films move, they are alive, they are happening for the first time if you haven’t seen them before, and so they’re new, not old pictures at all. And no one is more alive or fresh or eternally modern than that most American master, Preston Sturges.
He was also, as a purely historical fact, the first director in the talking era (1929 onwards) who wrote his own scripts. There were no writer-directors in the Hollywood system until Preston Sturges got so fed up of seeing his screenplays fumbled, or worse, put on by mediocre directors, that he made Paramount an offer. He was known as a hot writer, so he said they could have his next script for a dollar if he could direct it. To their everlasting glory, Paramount went for it, only adding that a dollar was too little, and upped it to $10.
And so, in 1940, the first film written and directed by Preston Sturges was released (in August) titled The Great McGinty , followed (in October) with the second film written and directed by Preston Sturges, a quirky romantic comedy, Christmas in July . And this delightful and extremely impressive double-barrelled beginning became part of the single most amazing, dazzling burst of creative energy and brilliance in the history of the American cinema. The Great McGinty – about a bum who gets paid to vote 37 times and goes on to become governor of the state – won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, which means that even the Academy wanted to herald the arrival of this major talent.
Over the succeeding four years, Preston wrote and directed one commercial comedy masterpiece after another: The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero and then The Great Moment (1944).
Although the last film in that list was deeply compromised by the studio’s editing, just about enough of Sturges’ conception remains so that you can tell – especially if you know Preston’s other pictures – that it must have once been a very sharp comedy-drama, if Paramount hadn’t tried to be smarter than a guy who had just given them seven hits in a row!
And, indeed, even by the end of 1941, Preston Sturges had become one of the very small number of directors whose name was advertised above the title: like Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock and C. B. DeMille. That same year, the New York Times’ chief film critic named The Lady Eve the best picture of the year, above Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley , and the name Preston Sturges came to be synonymous with a uniquely witty and vivid comic entertainment: a particularly pungent combination of American energy and brashness combined with European intelligence and sophistication. As fresh today as when they were made.
For sheer fall-down-on-the-floor laughs, I would have to say The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is, amazingly, considering the story, the funniest Sturges comedy. To this day, how Preston got away with this script – at the height of the puritanical Production Code and towards the end of World War II – still baffles me. The plot, in vulgar non-Code terms, goes like this: a young small-town girl gets pie-eyed at a rowdy farewell army celebration, gets screwed by at least one (possibly more) soldiers before they’re shipped off and finds that she’s been knocked up, can’t even remember the main guy’s name (whom she thinks she married) and gets her very-much-in-love boyfriend to be the father of the child. The child turns out to be children – a total of six – thus, the miracle! This picture is convincing proof that virtually any censorship can be outwitted by talent.
Look at The Lady Eve again an