Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges, born Edmund Preston Biden on August 29, 1898, in Chicago, Illinois, was an American playwright, composer, book writer, screenwriter, and film director who died on August 6, 1959. He is widely credited as the first screenwriter to establish himself as a successful Hollywood director.

Sturges was the son of Mary Estelle Dempsey, later known as Mary Desti, and traveling salesman Edmund C. Biden. His maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, while his father was of English descent. When Sturges was two years old, his mother left for Paris to pursue a singing career and annulled her marriage to his father. She subsequently married Solomon Sturges, a wealthy stockbroker, in 1901, and Solomon adopted Preston the following year. Mary Desti maintained a close friendship with dancer Isadora Duncan and operated Desti Beauty Products, a cosmetics firm that also sold art objects, perfumes, and clothing. As a young man, Sturges traveled frequently between the United States and Europe, at times accompanying Isadora Duncan's dance company. These years in France left him fluent in French, and he regarded the country as his second home throughout his life.

In 1916, Sturges worked as a runner for New York stockbrokers through a connection arranged by Solomon Sturges. The following year he enlisted in the United States Army Air Service, graduating as a lieutenant from Camp Dick in Texas without seeing combat. While stationed there, he wrote an essay titled "Three Hundred Words of Humor," which was published in the camp newspaper and constituted his first work in print. After returning from camp in 1919, he took a managing position at the Desti Emporium in New York, a store owned by his mother's fourth husband, where he remained for eight years.

Sturges's entry into playwriting in 1928 came about by chance. During a date with a young actress, she told him she had only been spending time with him as a form of dramatic research for a play she claimed to be writing, comparing him to a guinea pig used in an experiment. Sturges, outraged, declared that if she could write a play, he could write one that would be better and run longer. Within two months he had completed his first play, The Guinea Pig, only to discover that she had not been writing a play at all. That same year, Sturges performed on Broadway in Hotbed, a play by Paul Osborn. The Guinea Pig subsequently opened at the President Theatre on January 7, 1929, after an initial run at The Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Also in 1928, Sturges completed his second play, Strictly Dishonorable, writing it in just six days. The production ran for sixteen months and earned him over $300,000, attracting significant attention from Hollywood. By the end of that year he was writing for Paramount Pictures. His Broadway credits across this period included Child of Manhattan, Carnival in Flanders, The Guinea Pig, Make a Wish, and Recapture, among other productions. Three additional Sturges stage plays were produced between 1930 and 1932, one of them a musical, but none achieved the success of Strictly Dishonorable.

As his stage career wound down, Sturges worked in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire on short contracts for Universal, MGM, and Columbia. He also sold his original screenplay for The Power and the Glory to Fox in 1933, where it was filmed as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. Fox producer Jesse Lasky paid Sturges $17,500 plus seven percent of profits above one million dollars, a then-unprecedented arrangement for a screenwriter that immediately elevated his standing in the industry. The film, which follows a self-involved financier through a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, is sometimes regarded as a precursor to Citizen Kane. Throughout the remainder of the 1930s, Sturges worked within the studio system, earning $2,500 a week but growing dissatisfied with the way directors handled his dialogue.

In 1939, Sturges traded his screenplay for The Great McGinty, written six years earlier, to Paramount Pictures in exchange for the opportunity to direct it himself. Paramount publicized the arrangement by stating that Sturges had received just ten dollars for the script. When the film was released in 1940, its opening credits read "Written and Directed by Preston Sturges," marking the first time those two credits had appeared together on a sound film. For The Great McGinty, Sturges won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His success in combining the writing and directing roles helped open similar paths for writer-directors including Billy Wilder and John Huston.

Sturges went on to write and direct The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and other films, each of which appeared on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Laughs list of classic comedies. He received Academy Award nominations for both The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, both released in 1944, making him one of the most prominent filmmakers of that decade.