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Preston Sturges

Playwright, Screenwriter, Director, Studio Head

"A pretty girl is better than a plain one. A leg is better than an arm. A bedroom is better than a living room. An arrival is better that a departure. A birth is better than a death. A chase is better than a chat. A dog is better than a landscape. A kitten is better than a dog. A baby is better than a kitten. A kiss is better than a baby. A pratfall is better than anything."
-- Prestron Sturges

"I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started."

"I have never done anything but my very best work for anyone, and to do this and retain my first fine enthusiasm over a period of thirty years has required a rather special set of working conditions."

"By the very nature of his art, which depends on invention and innovation, a story teller must depart from the beaten track and, having done so, occasionally startle and disagree with some of his associates. Healthy disagreement we must have."

"The hook is a word or an idea spoken by one character which gives the next character something to hook onto when he responds or, like a trapeze artist, gives him something to swing from on his way to another point of view."

"You can't go around the theatres handing out cards saying, 'It isn't my fault'. You go onto the next one."

"When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again."

A scene from "Sullivan's Travels"

Preston Sturges' life is as unlikely as some of the plots of his best work. As a boy he helped out on stage productions for his mother's friend, Isadora Duncan (the scarf that strangled her was made by his mother's company, Maison Desti). He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during WWI. After the war he became an inventor, creating a kiss-proof lipstick called 'Red-Red Rouge', a tickertape machine, an intaglio photo-etching process, automobiles, airplanes and yachts. While recovering from an appendectomy in 1929, wrote his first play, "The Guinea Pig," followed by the smash hit, "Strictly Dishonorable". In financial trouble over producing his plays, he moved to Hollywood in 1932 to write screenplays. It wasn't long before he became frustrated by the lack of control he had over his work and wanted to direct the scripts he wrote. Paramount gave him this chance as part of a deal for selling his script for "The Great McGinty" (1940), at a cheap price (ten bucks). The film's success launched his career as writer/director and he had several hits over the next four years, creating a string of classic films. That success emboldened him to become an independent filmmaker, but that did not last long--he had a string of commercial failures and acquired a reputation as an expensive perfectionist. He moved to France to make what turned out to be his last movie, "The French, They Are a Funny Race" (1955). In 1959, he died at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, while writing his autobiography, "The Events Leading Up to My Death".

PROGENY: His son, Solomon Sturges (b. 1941), actor; His son Preston Jr. (b. 1953), author; His son Tom (b. 1956), music exec, author; Granddaughter Shannon Dempsey Sturges (b. 1968), daughter of Solomon and an actress and acting coach who combines beauty and goofiness in a way that could have made her grandfather proud, as well as a perfect heroine in one of his films!

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