Preston Sturges (29 August 1898 â?? 6 August 1959), originally Edmund Preston Biden, was a celebrated screenwriter and film 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 a Sturges character 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, which repeatedly poked its nose into Fonda's head.
Sturges is often credited as the first writer to direct his own script, but this is not true: Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was already writing and directing feature-length films by 1921. A few other major directors such as Frank Capra and Howard Hawks also preceded Sturges in making the leap from writing to directing, as did less celebrated figures. However, Sturges may have been the first celebrated Hollywood screenwriter to be promoted as having made the "leap" to directing for publicity purposes. Famously, he sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $1, in return for being allowed to direct the film. (The sum was quietly raised to $10 by the studio for legal reasons.)
Sturges' parents were Mary Estelle Dempsey and travelling salesman Edmund C. Biden; his maternal grandparents, Catherine Campbell Smyth and Dominick dâ??Este Dempsey, were immigrants from Ireland.
When Sturges was three years old, his eccentric 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, who adopted Preston in 1902. According to biographers, Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism." His mother, ultimately known as "Mary Desti" through her fourth marriage, was famous for her friendship with Isadora Duncan, even giving her the scarf that led to Duncan's freakish death. The young Sturges would sometimes travel from country to country with Duncan's dance company. Mary Desti also carried on a romantic affair with Aleister Crowley and collaborated with him on his magnum opus Magick (Book 4). In his memoirs Crowley described the young Sturges as "a most god-forsaken lout", and Sturges returned the favor with a vituperative mention of Crowley in his own memoirs.
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 he obtained through Solomon Sturges. The next year Preston 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 titled Three Hundred Words of Humor which was printed in the camp newspaper, becoming his first published work. 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.
In 1928, Sturges performed on Broadway in Hotbed, a short-lived play by Paul Osborn, and Sturges' first produced play, The Guinea Pig, opened in Massachusetts. A success, Sturges moved it to Broadway the following year, a turning point in his career. That same year also saw the opening of Sturges' second play, the hit Strictly Dishonorable. Written in just six days, the play ran for sixteen months and earned Sturges over $300,000, a staggering amount at the time. 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 of them were hits. By the end of the year, he was working more in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, operating on short contracts, for studios Universal, MGM, and Columbia. 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 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. Fox producer Jesse Lasky paid Sturges $17,500 plus a percentage of the profits, a then-unprecedented deal for a screenwriter, which instantly elevated Sturges' reputation in Hollywood â?? although the lucrative deal irritated as many as it impressed. Sturges later 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. This experience built his resolve to take control of his own projects, which he finally accomplished in 1939 by offering to sell his screenplay for The Great McGinty (written six years earlier) to Paramount for a dollar in exchange for the chance to direct it. Paramount's legal department subsequently upped the fee to $10. Sturges' 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 â?? and I won't â?? we'll have some fun. There are some wonderful pictures to be made, and God willing, I will make some of them."
Sturges 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 had a 30-year Hollywood career, Sturges' greatest comedies were filmed in a furious 5-year burst of activity from 1939 to 1943, during which he turned out The Great 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. Half a century later, four of these films â?? The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek â?? were chosen by the American Film Institute as being among the American Film Institute's 100 funniest American films. Their inimitable combination of sentiment and cynicism has kept them fresh for today's audiences.
Sturges' rich writing style has been described as that of "a lowbrow aristocrat, a melancholy wiseguy." His scripts were almost congenitally unable to deliver a single mood. During a tender romantic lakeside stroll in Sullivan's Travels, a hanged corpse dangles from a tree, independent of the storyline and uncommented upon. Yet, in Hail the Conquering Hero, the series of lies, crimes, and embarrassments all somehow bolster the film's theme of patriotism and duty.
Production on these films did not always go smoothly. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was literally 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 box office success for 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 didn't especially appreciate this, fearing that the audience would tire of repeatedly seeing the same faces in Sturges productions. But the director was adamant: "These little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures."
Members of Sturges' unofficial "stock company" included George Anderson, Al Bridge, Georgia Caine, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Robert Dudley, Byron Foulger, Robert Greig, Harry Hayden, Esther Howard, Arthur Hoyt, J. Farrell MacDonald, George Melford, Torben Meyer, Charles R. Moore, Frank Moran, Jack Norton, Franklin Pangborn, Emory Parnell, Victor Potel, Dewey Robinson, Harry Rosenthal, Julius Tannen, Max Wagner and Robert Warwick. In addition, Sturges re-used other actors, such as Sig Arno, Luis Alberni, Eric Blore, Porter Hall and Raymond Walburn, and even stars such as Joel McCrea and Rudy Vallee, who both did three films with Sturges, and Eddie Bracken, who did two.
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