Preston Sturges

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 DW 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 CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia