Preston Sturges

Known for DirectingBorn 1898-08-29Died 1959-08-06Chicago, Illinois, USA

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.Read more

Movies & web series

Port of Seven Seas

Hotel Haywire

The Birds and the Bees

Sullivan's Travels

Remember the Night

The Lady Eve

Never Say Die

Unfaithfully Yours

Hail the Conquering Hero

Child of Manhattan

If I Were King

Easy Living

The Good Fairy

The Palm Beach Story

Rock-a-Bye Baby

The Great McGinty

Christmas in July

They Just Had to Get Married

I Married a Witch

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

Thirty Day Princess

Twentieth Century

We Live Again

College Swing

Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer

The French, They Are a Funny Race

Diamond Jim

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

I'll Be Yours

Star Spangled Rhythm

Love Before Breakfast

Safeguarding Military Information

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend

Unfaithfully Yours

The Big Pond

The Great Moment

The Power and the Glory

Paris Holiday

Strictly Dishonorable

Reflets de Cannes