Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges

  • Birthday: 1898-08-29
  • Deathday: 1959-08-06
  • Place of birth: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Preston Sturges (29 August 1898 – 6 August 1959), originally Edmund Preston Biden, was a celebrated playwright, screenwriter and film director born in Chicago, Illinois. In 1941 he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film The Great McGinty. 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. In recent years, film scholars such as Alessandro Pirolini have also argued that Sturges' cinema anticipated more experimental narratives by contemporary directors such as Joel and Ethan Coen, Robert Zemeckis, and Woody Allen, along with prolific The Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder: "Many of [Sturges'] movies and screenplays reveal a restless and impatient attempt to escape codified rules and narrative schemata, and to push the mechanisms and conventions of their genre to the extent of unveiling them to the spectator. [See for example] the disruption of standardized timelines in films such as The Power and the Glory and The Great McGinty [or the way] an apparently classical comedy such as Unfaithfully Yours (1948) shifts into the realm of multiple and hypothetical narratives. Prior to Sturges, other figures in Hollywood (such as Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Frank Capra) had directed films from their own scripts. However, Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood figure to be initially mainly successfully established as a screenwriter and then to subsequently move into directing his own scripts, at a time when those roles were mostly entrenched and separate. Famously, Sturges 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. Description above from the Wikipedia article Preston Sturges, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Filmography

Paris Holiday

1958

As Serge Vitry

Star Spangled Rhythm

1942

As Preston Sturges

Christmas in July

1940

As Man at Shoeshine Stand (uncredited)

Production

The Lady Eve

1941

As Director

The Palm Beach Story

1942

As Director

Unfaithfully Yours

1948

As Director

Christmas in July

1940

As Director

The Great McGinty

1940

As Director

The Great Moment

1944

As Director

Hail the Conquering Hero

1944

As Director

Sullivan's Travels

1941

As Director

Unfaithfully Yours

1948

As Producer

I Married a Witch

1942

As Producer

The Lady Eve

1941

As Screenplay

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

1947

As Screenplay

The Palm Beach Story

1942

As Screenplay

Unfaithfully Yours

1948

As Screenplay

Christmas in July

1940

As Writer

Remember the Night

1940

As Screenplay

The Great McGinty

1940

As Writer

The Great Moment

1944

As Screenplay

Easy Living

1937

As Screenplay

If I Were King

1938

As Writer

Never Say Die

1939

As Screenplay

Port of Seven Seas

1938

As Writer

Thirty Day Princess

1934

As Screenplay

Diamond Jim

1935

As Writer

We Live Again

1934

As Adaptation

Child of Manhattan

1933

As Theatre Play

The Big Pond

1930

As Dialogue

Hotel Haywire

1937

As Writer

Love Before Breakfast

1936

As Writer

Sullivan's Travels

1941

As Writer

Strictly Dishonorable

1931

As Theatre Play

The Good Fairy

1935

As Screenplay

Twentieth Century

1934

As Writer

College Swing

1938

As Screenplay

The Power and the Glory

1933

As Screenplay

Rock-a-Bye Baby

1958

As Story

I'll Be Yours

1947

As Writer

Unfaithfully Yours

1984

As Original Film Writer

The Invisible Man

1933

As Writer

The Birds and the Bees

1956

As Screenplay

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