Preston Sturges

Life & Legacy

Preston Sturges (; born Edmund Preston Biden; August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, inventor, screenwriter, and film director.
He is credited as the first screenwriter to find success as a director. Prior to Sturges, other Hollywood directors (such as Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra) had directed films from their own scripts; however, Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood figure to establish success as a screenwriter and then move into directing his own scripts. He sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $10 in exchange for directing it. Anthony Lane writes that "To us, that seems old hat, one of the paths by which the ambitious get to run their own show, but back in 1940, when The Great McGinty came out, it was very new hat indeed; the opening credits proclaimed 'Written and directed by Preston Sturges,' and it was the first time in the history of talkies that the two passive verbs had appeared together onscreen. From that conjunction sprang a whole tradition of filmmaking: literate, spiky, defensive, markedly personal, and almost always funny." For that film, Sturges won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Sturges received Oscar nominations for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero (both 1944). He also wrote and directed The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels (both 1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), all appearing on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Laughs list.
His career is chronicled in Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer.