Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges, originally Edmund Preston Biden, was a celebrated 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: “Many of 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. the disruption of standardized timelines in films such as The Power and the Glory and The Great McGinty an apparently classical comedy such as Unfaithfully Yours shifts into the realm of multiple and hypothetical narratives.

Though not the first person in Hollywood to direct from his own script – Charlie Chaplin had done so as early as 1921 – Sturges is often regarded as the first screenwriter, established as a success in that field, to move into directing his own scripts, at a time when those roles were almost universally 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.