A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Born:
August 29, 1898
Died:
August 6, 1959
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.
Adaptation:
1934 We Live Again
Dialogue:
1930 The Big Pond
1934 We Live Again
Director:
1930 The Big Pond
1934 We Live Again
1940 Christmas in July
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
Original Film Writer:
1930 The Big Pond
1934 We Live Again
1940 Christmas in July
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
1984 Unfaithfully Yours
Producer:
1930 The Big Pond
1934 We Live Again
1940 Christmas in July
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 I Married a Witch
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
1984 Unfaithfully Yours
Screenplay:
1930 The Big Pond
1933 The Power and the Glory
1934 Thirty Day Princess
1934 We Live Again
1935 The Good Fairy
1937 Easy Living
1938 College Swing
1939 Never Say Die
1940 Christmas in July
1940 Remember the Night
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 I Married a Witch
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
1956 The Birds and the Bees
1984 Unfaithfully Yours
Story:
1930 The Big Pond
1933 The Power and the Glory
1934 Thirty Day Princess
1934 We Live Again
1935 The Good Fairy
1937 Easy Living
1938 College Swing
1939 Never Say Die
1940 Christmas in July
1940 Remember the Night
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 I Married a Witch
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
1956 The Birds and the Bees
1958 Rock-a-Bye Baby
1984 Unfaithfully Yours
Theatre Play:
1930 The Big Pond
1931 Strictly Dishonorable
1933 Child of Manhattan
1933 The Power and the Glory
1934 Thirty Day Princess
1934 We Live Again
1935 The Good Fairy
1937 Easy Living
1938 College Swing
1939 Never Say Die
1940 Christmas in July
1940 Remember the Night
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 I Married a Witch
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
1956 The Birds and the Bees
1958 Rock-a-Bye Baby
1984 Unfaithfully Yours
Writer:
1930 The Big Pond
1931 Strictly Dishonorable
1933 Child of Manhattan
1933 The Invisible Man
1933 The Power and the Glory
1933 They Just Had to Get Married
1934 Thirty Day Princess
1934 Twentieth Century
1934 We Live Again
1935 Diamond Jim
1935 The Good Fairy
1936 Love Before Breakfast
1937 Easy Living
1937 Hotel Haywire
1938 College Swing
1938 If I Were King
1938 Port of Seven Seas
1939 Never Say Die
1940 Christmas in July
1940 Remember the Night
1940 The Great McGinty
1941 Sullivan's Travels
1941 The Lady Eve
1942 I Married a Witch
1942 Safeguarding Military Information
1942 The Palm Beach Story
1943 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 The Great Moment
1947 I'll Be Yours
1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
1948 Unfaithfully Yours
1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
1955 The French, They Are a Funny Race
1956 The Birds and the Bees
1958 Rock-a-Bye Baby
1984 Unfaithfully Yours
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.