September Predictions

Recent Best Picture Predictions for 2007:

The Assasination of Jesse James

No Country for Old Men

In The Valley of Elah

There Will Be Blood

Atonement

Gentleman’s Director ~ William Wyler

Wyler was born Willi Weiller to a Jewish family in Mulhouse in the French region of Alsace (then part of the German Empire). He was related to Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, through his mother (a cousin of Laemmle’s). His family connections served him well, as he became the youngest director on the Universal lot in 1925. In 1928, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He soon proved himself an able craftsman, and in the early 1930s became one of Universal’s greatest assets, directing such solid films as The Love Trap, Hell’s Heroes, and Tom Brown of Culver and The Good Fairy.

He later signed with Samuel Goldwyn and directed such quality films as These Three, Come and Get It, Dodsworth, Dead End, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Letter, The Westerner, and The Little Foxes.

Between 1942 and 1945, Wyler served as a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and directed the documentary Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. He also directed two key films which first captured the mood of the nation as it prepared for battle and, four years later, peace. Mrs. Miniver (1942), a story of a middle class English family adjusting to the war in Europe, helped condition American audiences to life in wartime (and galvanized support for the British). The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the story of three veterans arriving home and adjusting to civilian life, dramatized the problems of returning veterans for those who had remained on the homefront. Wyler won Best Director Oscars for both films (which also won Best Picture Oscars).

During the 1950s and 1960s, Wyler directed a handful of critically acclaimed and influential films, most notably Roman Holiday (1953) for introducing Audrey Hepburn to American audiences and leading to her first Oscar, The Heiress earning Olivia de Havilland her second Oscar, and Ben-Hur (1959) for its eleven Oscar wins (matched only twice, by Titanic in 1997 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003).

In 1965, Wyler won the Irving Thalberg Award for career achievement. Eleven years later, he received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. In addition to his Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins, ten of Wyler’s films earned Best Picture nominations. He received twelve Oscar nominations for Best Director, winning three times, while three dozen of his actors won Oscars or were nominated.

Although most of the most famous directors had their own particular style, Wyler (along with Michael Curtiz) didn’t. He did not build a stable of players like Capra, Sturges or Ford. He directed varied types of films without any trademark shots or themes. But his films were always well crafted and beautifully made.

On July 24, 1981, Wyler gave an interview with his daughter, producer Catherine Wyler for Directed by William Wyler, a PBS documentary about his life and career. A mere three days later, Wyler died from a heart attack. Wyler’s last words on film concern a vision of directing his “next picture…Going Home“. Wyler is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Wyler was briefly married to Margaret Sullavan (25 November 1934 – 13 March 1936) and married Margaret Tallichet on 23 October 1938 until his death; they had four children.

Frank Lloyd ~ From Stage to Film to Directing

Born in Glasgow, Scotland. The son of a musical comedy actor, he began his own career on the British stage at 15. He came to Canada in 1910, the US in 1913, entered films as an actor in 1914, and began directing the following year. In the next four decades he directed some 100 films, for Paramount, then Fox and other studios, many of them routine commercial productions but some truly meritorious. A highly skilled craftsman, he had few pretensions about the significance of film other than as a means for entertainment, or about his own role as a director, and blended easily into the Hollywood studio system. Accordingly, he is short-shrifted by many film historians. But films like CAVALCADE (1933), MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935), and WELLS FARGO (1937) reveal not only technical mastery but also a cohesive style and a keen visual sense. Lloyd produced or co-produced many of his own films as well as a number of productions directed by others, and in the silent years he wrote many of his own scripts.

Lloyd was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was once married to writer Virginia Kellogg.

The Auteur ~ Woody Allen

Born Allen Stewart Koningsberg in Brooklyn, NY, he attended City College of New York and NYU. Winner of a best director Oscar for ANNIE HALL (1977) and two Academy Awards for best screenplay, he is one of a handful of American filmmakers who can wear the label “auteur.” His films, be they dramas or comedies, are remarkably personal and are permeated with Allen’s preoccupations in art, religion and love.
After a semester at New York University (where he reportedly failed a film course), Allen began a successful career in comedy by joining “Your Show of Shows” as a gag writer and providing comedic material for TV stars like Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar and Art Carney. In 1961, Allen, exploiting a rebellious and guilt-ridden urban Jewish mentality, soon began performing his own material as a standup comic and became a well-known figure on the Greenwich Village club circuit, on records and on college campuses.
In 1965, Allen made his feature film acting and writing debut with director Clive Donner’s farce WHAT’S NEW, PUSSYCAT? Shortly thereafter he debuted as a filmmaker of sorts by re-tooling a minor Japanese spy thriller with his own storyline and with English dialogue dubbed by American actors. The amusing result was WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY? (1966) which, along with the James Bond spoof CASINO ROYALE (1967), which he co-wrote and acted in, launched Allen on one of the most successful and unusual filmmaking careers of recent history.

The year 1977 saw a step toward more serious territory with the bittersweet ANNIE HALL. While still a comedy, the film embraces more sophisticated narrative devices (Allen as hero, for instance, addresses the camera). It’s also a more personal film, with the director/screenwriter/star tackling themes and problems closer to his own experience. Allen’s screen persona in ANNIE HALL reflected his real-life status at the time: a New York Jewish entertainer with a “shiksa” girlfriend (Keaton), an outsider looking in on the exclusive worlds of both Hollywood and the gentile. For many, ANNIE HALL remains the quintessential Allen movie: personal and thoughtful at the same time that it’s sharply satiric and entertaining. The film won four Oscars, two of which (best director and best original screenplay) went to Allen himself.

The Genius ~ Steven Spielberg

Born December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Throughout his early teens, Spielberg made amateur 8 mm “adventure” movies with his friends, the first of which he shot at a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. He charged admission (25 Cents) to his home movies (which involved the wrecks he staged with his Lionel train set) while his sister sold popcorn. At 13, Spielberg won a prize for a 40-minute war movie he titled Escape to Nowhere. At Arcadia High School in Phoenix, Arizona in 1963, the then 16-year-old Spielberg wrote and directed his first independent movie, a 140-minute science fiction adventure called Firelight (which would later inspire Close Encounters). The movie, with a budget of USD$400, was shown in his local movie theater and generated a profit of $100. A writer for the local Phoenix press wrote that he could expect great things to come.
After his parents divorced, he moved to California with his father. His three sisters and mother remained in Arizona, where he attended Passover seders at the home of Zalman and Pearl Segal on an annual basis. He graduated from Saratoga High School in Saratoga, California, in 1965, which he called the “worst experience” of his life and “hell on Earth”. During this time Spielberg became an Eagle Scout. After moving to California, he applied to attend film school at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television three separate times but was unsuccessful due to his C grade average. After Spielberg became famous, USC awarded Spielberg an honorary degree in 1994, and in 1996 he became a trustee of the University. He attended California State University, Long Beach, to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. His actual career began when he returned to Universal studios as an unpaid, three-day-a-week intern and guest of the editing department. While attending college at Long Beach State in the 1960s, Spielberg also became member of Theta Chi Fraternity. In 2002, thirty-five years after starting college, Spielberg finished his degree via independent projects at CSULB, and was awarded a B.A. in Film Production and Electronic Arts with an option in Film/Video Production.
As an intern and guest of Universal Studios, Spielberg made his first short film for theatrical release, the 24 minute long movie Amblin’ in 1968. After Sidney Sheinberg, then the vice-president of production for Universal’s TV arm saw the film, Spielberg became the youngest director ever to be signed to a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio (Universal). He dropped out of Long Beach State in 1969 to take the television director contract at Universal Studios and began his career as a professional director.Though critics and audiences have yet to reach a firm consensus on the merits or even the defining character of his work, Steven Spielberg is arguably the most important figure to emerge from the creative ferment of American cinema in the 1970s. For better or worse, he has changed the way movies are made and what they are made about. Spielberg is the Western world’s most famous living filmmaker; as a producer and director, he has become a household word and a veritable brand name.

Spielberg has succeeded in combining the intimacy of a personal vision with the epic requirements of the modern commercial blockbuster but his astonishing success has invalidated him as an artist in many eyes. Issues of the marketplace aside, Spielberg certainly travels in some august creative company: Like Welles, he was celebrated and penalized for precocity; like Hitchcock, he has been alternately praised and damned as a master of emotional manipulation; and like Griffith, Chaplin, Borzage and Capra, he has been criticized for shameless sentimentality. Perhaps Spielberg’s most important spiritual predecessor is actually Walt Disney, another creative producer who made himself into a brand name in the process of attending to the serious business of making “frivolous” entertainments.

Several Spielberg films have become landmarks in the development of special effects, both in their visual and aural aspects. However this filmmaker is no technocrat nor does he display the serious intellectual interest in science fiction one finds in some of Stanley Kubrick’s films. Spielberg may utilize elements of sci-fi and fantasy but he tends to eschew heavy ideas in favor of sublime feelings, particularly childlike awe and trust. Indeed, his work has decisively influenced the emphasis in contemporary science fiction film on the sensibility of youth. His films often succeed in spite of their blatantly sentimental aspects, because the director is able to sustain even the shakiest narrative with masterful use of emotionally potent visual imagery. Spielberg possesses, in short, an uncanny knack for eliciting and manipulating audience response.

Perhaps more than any mainstream filmmaker since the glory days of the French New Wave, Spielberg makes extensive use of reflexivity and intertextuality to deepen the meaning of his films. These narrative tools make his powerful images more resonant and seemingly archetypal even as they often serve as an auto-critique of the works’ thematic content.

George Stevens ~ A Directing Giant

Born in Oakland, California, Stevens broke into the movie business as a cameraman, working on many Laurel and Hardy shorts. His first feature film was The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble in 1933.

Beginning his career as an assistant cameraman and gag writer for low-budget westerns and Laurel & Hardy comedy shorts in the 1920s and early 1930s, George Stevens eventually progressed through the ranks to become one of classic Hollywood’s most reliable producer-directors, earning five Academy Award nominations as Best Director and winning the Oscar twice. Though his films lack a signature visual style, they are marked by compelling performances and notable cast chemistry. Further, their engaging all-American story lines and subtle sentimentality make Stevens one of the Hollywood’s foremost chroniclers of the pursuit of the American Dream.

Stevens’ earliest directorial efforts were comedy shorts made for producer Hal Roach at Universal, but he soon moved to RKO where he was permitted to direct a few feature-length comedies. In 1935, RKO star Katharine Hepburn chose Stevens to direct her in ALICE ADAMS, from Booth Tarkington’s novel about a lower-middle class girl with big dreams. Kate’s vote of confidence and the film’s success launched Stevens career.

The following year, Stevens was chosen to lead the studio’s most famous screen team, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the sixth of the dancing duo’s nine musicals for RKO, SWING TIME (1936). By all standards one of the best films in the series, SWING TIME features plenty of light comedy and such memorable musical numbers as “Pick Yourself Up,” “The Way You Look Tonight” and “Never Gonna Dance.” It was Ginger’s favorite of her films with Astaire and the best of the four musicals Stevens’ directed over the course of his career.

In 1941, Stevens directed Cary Grant to his first Oscar nomination for his performance as a cocksure newspaperman who struggles to become a responsible family man in Columbia’s romantic drama PENNY SERENADE. Co-starring Irene Dunne along with Beulah Bondi and Edgar Buchanan, the film successfully combined touching comic, tear-jerking tragic and heart-warming romantic elements into an all-around crowd pleaser and box-office success.

Also earning an Oscar nomination for her performance in a Stevens romantic comedy was squeaky silver screen comedienne Jean Arthur who, when forced to share her wartime apartment with Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn, cries so hard the audience just can’t stop laughing. THE MORE THE MERRIER was Stevens’ fourth major box office hit in a row and the recipient of six Oscar nominations.
Soon after completing THE MORE THE MERRIER in 1943 (a film for which he received both a Best Director and a Best Picture Oscar nomination — the first of five times he would be so honored), Stevens joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps. With the rank of major, he led the special motion picture unit assigned to photograph the activities of the Sixth Army during World War II, including the Normandy beach landings on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies marching into Paris in August 1944, and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in April 1945. Some of the footage Stevens and his men shot is the only known color footage of the war in Europe, and almost twenty years after his death in 1975, Stevens’ son George Stevens Jr. compiled much of his father’s wartime work into a made-for-TV documentary entitled “George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin” (1994).

Stevens won his first Best Director Academy Award for his 1951 adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, A PLACE IN THE SUN. Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters with Anne Revere and Raymond Burr, it received a total of six Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture. Haunting and heart-wrenching, A PLACE IN THE SUN is quite possibly Stevens’ greatest filmmaking achievement.

Stevens produced and directed another western, GIANT (1956), a $5 million epic about the multi-generational romances of a Texas cattle family, based on the novel by Edna Ferber and starring three of the biggest stars of the mid-1950s, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. His work on the film earned Stevens his second Best Director Oscar, but his statuette was the sole award the film received from its amazing ten Academy Award nominations. In the Best Picture category, GIANT lost to another star-studded epic, AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS (1956), though half-a-century later, GIANT has better weathered the test of time.

Following his western epic GIANT, Stevens spent three years preparing to tackle the more intimate and highly sensitive subject matter of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959). This story of eight Jews hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in wartime Amsterdam was adapted from a stage production based on the diary of a young holocaust victim who chronicled in detail her almost two years in hiding. Starring a then-unknown Millie Perkins in the title role and featuring Oscar-nominated supporting performances by veterans Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn, ANNE FRANK received somewhat mixed reviews from critics who felt Perkins’ lack of acting experience detracted from the film as much as her fresh simplicity added to it. Nevertheless, Stevens’ accomplishments were rewarded yet again by the Academy which bestowed eight Oscar nominations on the film.

Overall, Stevens was nominated 6 times for Best Picture, 5 times for Best Director winning two Oscars for Directing, A Place in the Sun and Giant. He also won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1953

Stevens has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1701 Vine Street.
Stevens died after a heart attack on his ranch in Lancaster, California.

A Hollywood Master ~ John Ford

Born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. John Ford grew up with the American cinema. In the early days of filmmaking, his older brother Francis moved to Hollywood to work for Universal Pictures and John joined him in 1914, forging his apprenticeship as a moviemaker during the formative period of the classical Hollywood cinema.By 1917 he had been promoted to contract director, fashioning Westerns which often starred Harry Carey, Sr. Ford moved to the Fox studio in 1921 and established his reputation with such films as the Western spectacular THE IRON HORSE (1924). In his silent films, Ford composed images with a formality and a symmetry that valued order; even at this stage, he had acquired the mantle of a Hollywood master.

Although best known for his Westerns such as the landmark STAGECOACH (1939), Ford worked in many other genres throughout his long career. Early in the 1930s, he led Fox’s top comedy starn Will Rogers, through a number of features. Ford also set a number of his films in his parents’ native Ireland. THE INFORMER (1935), a drama of the Irish rebellion, won him the first of four Academy Awards for his direction. In retrospect, the film seems stylistically stodgy and thematically preachy, especially next to the vitality of THE QUIET MAN (1952), an unpretentious film about an Irish-American returning to settle in his native land. Ford also dealt with American history in THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (1936), YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939), DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (1939) and THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940).
After WW II Ford fashioned some of the best westerns ever to come out of Hollywood, including SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), WAGON MASTER (1950), THE SEARCHERS (1956) and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962). In creating the archetype for the genre in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), Ford focused on the classic cinematic shoot-out, the famous final gunfight at the O.K. Corral, where Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers avenge the murder of their youngest brother. Against the harsh background of the buttes and desert of Monument Valley, Ford had the Earps ally with Easterner Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) to rid Tombstone of the evil Clantons and bring civilization to the town. In reshaping these familiar elements, Ford demonstrated that Hollywood genre films could be transformed into complex artifacts of popular culture and history.

Ford’s postwar westerns examined all facets of the settling of the West. He began with a shared optimism in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE and SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON and ended with a close examination of the dark side of manifest destiny in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.

Possibly his most underrated film, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, should be singled out for its brilliant use of color: rich and muted hues blended into an often somber aura. In this transitional work, part of a trilogy (including FORT APACHE, 1948 and RIO GRANDE, 1950) about life in the United States cavalry, Ford praises the work of the military in settling the West, while undercutting the role of war in settling disputes. THE SEARCHERS, now highly regarded by critics, historians, and such contemporary directors as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, presents not only a rousing adventure tale, but also a melancholy examination of the contradictions of settling the Old West.

If THE SEARCHERS is one of the most beautiful color films ever made, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, in black-and-white, is surely one of the most bleak and barren. This dark vision of a West of deceit and lying, abandons the stunning Technicolor vistas of the buttes of Monument Valley for the rickety buildings of a ramshackle town continually cast in shadow. The heroic shooting by Ranson Stoddard (James Stewart) of evil Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), revealed in flashback, is shown by the end of the film to be a lie and a sham. Still, society hails Stoddard as a hero and elevates him to a position of power as a United States Senator. The true Western hero, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), dies a pauper, unknown, save to his closest friends.

Although his final film was 7 WOMEN (1966), CHEYENNE AUTUMN, released in 1964 and his final film shot in Monument Valley, seems a more fitting cap to a career begun some fifty years earlier. Ford made many of the best films ever to come out of Hollywood, even as he managed to make a few of the worst. By focusing on the aforementioned works, one overlooks the wretched excess of THE WINGS OF EAGLES (1957). How he could make this film just after his masterpiece, THE SEARCHERS, is a paradox that suggests a great deal about working in Hollywood.

He married Mary McBryde Smith, on July 3, 1920 (two children). Ford never divorced his wife, but had a five-year affair with Katharine Hepburn after they met during the filming of Mary of Scotland (1936). The longer revised version of Directed by John Ford shown on Turner Classic Movies in November, 2006 features directors Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, and Martin Scorsese, who suggest that the string of classic films Ford directed 1936-1941 was due in part to his affair with Hepburn.

Ford is the only director to have won 4 Academy Awards for Direction.

Condensed biography from Baseline’s Encyclopedia of Film

The Women’s Director ~ George Cukor

Cukor was born in New York City to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Victor F. and Helen (Gross) Cukor. (His name means sugar in Hungarian.) As a teenager, he was infatuated with theater and often cut classes to attend afternoon matinees. Following his graduation from De Witt Clinton High School in 1916, he spent a year with the Students Army Training Corps. He then obtained a job as an assistant stage manager for a Chicago theater company. After gaining three years of experience, he formed his own stock company in Rochester, New York in 1920, and worked there for seven years. He then returned to Broadway where he worked with such formidable actresses as Ethel Barrymore, Dorothy Gish, Estelle Winwood, and Jeanne Eagels.
When Hollywood began to recruit New York theater talent for sound films, Cukor answered their call and moved there in 1929. His first job was as a dialog director at Paramount Pictures for the film River of Romance (1929), followed by All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) at Universal Pictures. He then co-directed three films at Paramount before making his solo debut directing Tallulah Bankhead in Tarnished Lady (1931). Cukor left Paramount after a legal dispute resulting from his dismissal from an earlier Paramount film, One Hour With You (1932), and went to work with David O. Selznick at RKO Studios.
Cukor’s career flourished at RKO where he directed a string of impressive films including What Price Hollywood? (1932), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Camille (1937).
By this time, Cukor had established a reputation as a director who could coax great performances from actresses and he became known as a “woman’s director,” a title which he resented. One of Cukor’s first ingenues was actress Katharine Hepburn, who debuted in A Bill of Divorcement and whose looks and personality left RKO officials at a loss as to how to use her. Cukor ended up directing her in her most successful films and they became close friends off the set.
Cukor was hired to direct Gone with the Wind by David O. Selznick in 1937 and he spent two years with pre-production duties as well as spending long hours coaching Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, the film’s stars. Cukor was replaced after less than three weeks of shooting, but continued to coach Leigh and De Havilland off the set.

Following the Gone with the Wind debacle, Cukor directed The Women (1939), a popular film notable for its all female cast and The Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Katharine Hepburn. He also directed another of his favorite actresses, Greta Garbo, in Two Faced Woman (1941), her last film before she retired from the screen.
The 1940s was a decade of hits and misses for Cukor. He was off track with Two Faced Woman as well as Her Cardboard Lover (1942) starring Norma Shearer. However, he did achieve more success with films such as A Woman’s Face (1941) with Joan Crawford, Gaslight (1944) with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and Adam’s Rib (1949) with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
Cukor’s reputation as an actor’s director continued as he helped several actors win Academy Awards. James Stewart won a Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story, Ronald Colman won a Best Actor Oscar for A Double Life (1947) and Judy Holliday won for Best Actress for Born Yesterday (1950}. In 1954, Cukor made his first film in color, A Star Is Born which featured an impressive come-back performance by Judy Garland. He directed the ill-fated Something’s Got to Give in 1962. Progress on the film was arduous throughout, and Cukor’s relationship with the film’s star, Marilyn Monroe, was consistently difficult and he was openly hostile towards her. Monroe was found dead in her Los Angeles home several months after the production began and the film was never completed. Two years later, Cukor finally won an Academy Award himself, for Best Director, after 5 previous nods, for My Fair Lady (1964), for which Rex Harrison won a Best Actor Oscar too.

He continued to work into his 80s and directed his last film, Rich And Famous (1981) with Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen.
It was an “open secret” in Hollywood that Cukor was homosexual. Cukor was also a celebrated bon vivant; during the heyday of Hollywood his home was the site of weekly Sunday parties and his guests knew that they would always find interesting company, good food, and a beautiful atmosphere when they visited. Cukor’s friends were of paramount importance to him and he kept his home filled with their photographs. Regular attendees at his soirées included Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. , Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Richard Cromwell, Judy Garland, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, James Whale, Edith Head, and Norma Shearer, especially after the death of her first husband, Irving Thalberg.
George Cukor died on January 24, 1983 at the age of 83. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Best Directors

During the month of September we are going to take an inside look at the Oscar’s Best Directors.  The men and women behind the film that moved the stars, that gave the film it’s edge or special touch.

Share with us the next few weeks as we take a look at some of the greatest directors in Hollywood.

Casablanca

One of the greatest movies ever made, A flawless fim and rated in the top ten greatest movies of all time, Casablanca was considered for eight Academy Awards for the year 1943. [Actually, it should have competed against Mrs. Miniver (1942) (the Best Picture winner in the previous year), since it premiered in New York in November of that year. However, because it didn't show in Los Angeles until its general release that January, it was ineligible for awards in 1942, and competed in 1943.] The nominations included Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Best Supporting Actor (Claude Rains), Best B/W Cinematography (Arthur Edeson, known for The Maltese Falcon (1941)), Best Score (Max Steiner, known for Gone With the Wind (1939)), and Best Film Editing (Owen Marks). The dark-horse film won three awards (presented in early March of 1944): Best Picture (producer Hal B. Wallis), Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Bogart lost to Paul Lukas for his role in Watch on the Rhine. And Bergman wasn’t even nominated for this film, but instead was nominated for Best Actress for For Whom The Bell Tolls (and she lost to Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette). Bogart had made three other films in 1943: Sahara, Action in the North Atlantic, and Thank Your Lucky Stars.

Directed by the talented Hungarian-accented Michael Curtiz and shot almost entirely on studio sets, the film moves quickly through a surprisingly tightly constructed plot, even though the script was written from day to day as the filming progressed and no one knew how the film would end – who would use the two exit visas? [Would Ilsa, Rick's lover from a past romance in Paris, depart with him or leave with her husband Victor, the leader of the underground resistance movement?] And three weeks after shooting ended, producer Hal Wallis contributed the film’s famous final line – delivered on a fog-shrouded runway.