Person Details

Birthday: 1898-08-29 16:32:51

Death: 1959-08-06 16:32:51

Aliases: No known aliases

Gender: Male

Place of birth: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Homepage:

Movie Involvements: 55

TV Involvements: 0


Most Famous Work

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.

Most Famous Work

The Invisible Man
Average
8

The Invisible Man

(1933) Writer
I Married a Witch
Average
7

I Married a Witch

(1942) Producer
The Lady Eve
Average
7

The Lady Eve

(1941) Screenplay
Sullivan's Travels
Average
8

Sullivan's Travels

(1941) Writer
The Palm Beach Story
Average
7

The Palm Beach Story

(1942) Screenplay
Twentieth Century
Average
7

Twentieth Century

(1934) Writer
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Average
7
Unfaithfully Yours
Average
7

Unfaithfully Yours

(1948) Screenplay

Acting

Year Character Movie/Tv
1990 (archive)
1958 Serge Vitry
1942 Preston Sturges
1940 Man at Shoeshine Stand (uncredited)
Year Character Movie/Tv

Writing

Year Role Movie/Tv
1984 Original Film Writer
1958 Story
1956 Screenplay
1955 Writer
1949 Writer
1948 Screenplay
1947 Screenplay
Writer
1944 Writer
Screenplay
1943 Writer
1942 Screenplay
1941 Writer
Screenplay
Writer
1940 Writer
Writer
Screenplay
1939 Screenplay
1938 Writer
Writer
Screenplay
1937 Screenplay
Writer
1936 Writer
1935 Writer
Screenplay
1934 Adaptation
Screenplay
Writer
1933 Writer
Screenplay
Theatre Play
Writer
1931 Theatre Play
1930 Dialogue
Year Role Movie/Tv

Directing

Production


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