Nick Smedley - Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywoods First Writer-Director

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.

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.

Nicks 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 hed 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 Im doing here.

And thank you to my father. Not a day goes by without a thought of you and me and all we missed.

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.

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, Sullivans 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 havent seen them before, and so theyre 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 Sullivans Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgans Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero and then The Great Moment (1944).

Although the last film in that list was deeply compromised by the studios editing, just about enough of Sturges conception remains so that you can tell especially if you know Prestons other pictures that it must have once been a very sharp comedy-drama, if Paramount hadnt 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