Showing posts with label Gone With the Wind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gone With the Wind. Show all posts

Best Art Direction, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

The nominees were ...

And the Oscar went to ... 

This was the first of five Oscar wins for Wheeler, who also was nominated twenty-four times, a record exceeded only by MGM's Cedric Gibbons and Edwin Willis. Trained as an architect at the University of Southern California, he had worked as Gibbons's assistant art director before being hired by David O. Selznick in 1936. Wheeler's work on Selznick's film The Garden of Allah, which was shot in Technicolor, prepared him for the use of color in Gone With the Wind. The actual design of GWTW was done by William Cameron Menzies, but technicalities in the Academy's nominating rules prevented Menzies from being nominated for art direction. (The Academy compensated by granting Menzies a special award for his work on the film. A similar courtesy might well have been extended to Walter Plunkett, the costume designer.) But it was Wheeler's architectural background that helped bring Menzies's ideas to fulfillment. In 1944, Wheeler became the chief art director at 20th Century-Fox. 

Wheeler, left, looks at pre-production sketches, many of them by William Cameron Menzies, with producer David O. Selznick
The Twelve Oaks library in sketch form ...
... and as realized on film
Tara, larger and more opulent than a real plantation house would have been, and with the curiously off-set entrance
Tara after filming
The film's design contrasts an ante-bellum grace ... 
... with the Victorian excess of Scarlett's boudoir after the war
There was no costume design category in 1939 for Walter Plunkett to win.


No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Best Cinematography, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

 Color had arrived, and was given its own category in the cinematography awards. But there was still some hesitancy on the Academy's part, and for some reason it decided to allow each studio or production company to submit a preliminary list of suggested nominees, and then chose two "official" contenders for the final vote. This unwieldy practice was abandoned after one year. 

The nominees were ... 
(Black and White) 
Preliminary nominees:

(Color) 

And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black and White) 
Gregg Toland

Though it covers only the first half of Emily Brontë's great mad novel, the film is one of Hollywood's romantic classics, thanks to the incredible beauty of the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, the sure-handed direction of William Wyler, and perhaps most of all, Toland's brilliant chiaroscuro photography. This is, almost incredibly, the sole Oscar for Toland, one of the most acclaimed cinematographers in Hollywood history. His career was linked with producer Sam Goldwyn's -- Toland photographed thirty-seven of the producer's films. He had begun his career in the silent era, and was responsible for many innovations, including a method of muffling the noise of the camera once sound came in. He is best known for his work with deep-focus composition, giving depth and clarity to images, and by the time of his death from a heart attack in 1948, at the age of forty-four, he was the highest-paid cinematographer in Hollywood. He is also one of the few to receive solo billing in the opening credits of the movies he filmed.
Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights

(Color) 
Ernest Haller

Ray Rennahan
Haller had begun his career as a cameraman in 1915 and was a director of photography by 1920. He received his first nomination for Jezebel, which prompted producer David O. Selznick to hire him for Gone With the Wind, replacing Lee Garmes, who had disagreements with the Technicolor consultants who were contractually obligated to supervise any film made with the technique. Haller had had little experience with Technicolor, so Rennahan, a pioneer in color cinematography, was hired to work with him. Haller received five more nominations, the last in 1963 for Lilies of the Field. Rennahan began working with color during the 1920s, filming among other things a color sequence for Cecil B. DeMille's 1924 The Ten Commandments.  Much color work was done on short films in the early days, and one of Rennahan's shorts, La Cucaracha, won the 1934 short film Oscar. He also filmed the first full-length technicolor feature, Becky Sharp, in 1935. He won a second Oscar for Blood and Sand in 1941. After the advent of color television, he spent most of his time working in that medium.

Gone With the Wind

No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Best Writing, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940


The nominees were ... 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 

Foster's story was originally called "The Gentleman From Montana," although in the film the state Mr. Smith represents is never named. Foster had begun his career writing gags for the silent comedies produced by Hal Roach. He also began directing in 1936, but was more successful as a screenwriter. He received a second nomination for the screenplay of The More the Merrier.

(Screenplay) 

Howard was killed in a tractor accident on his Massachusetts farm a few months before Gone With the Wind premiered. His first draft of a screenplay was four hundred pages long, enough for a six-and-a-half-hour film. So other hands were turned to it: Jo Swerling, Oliver Garrett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Lee Mahin, John Van Druten, and Ben Hecht (who allegedly made his contributions without ever reading Margaret Mitchell's novel). In his biography of David O. Selznick, David Thomson puts it this way: Howard "was only designated writer, the figure around whom other efforts congregated. His was the draft to be rewritten, the wall against every other ball could be thrown." But Howard got sole credit, in part as a gesture of respect to his memory, and his widow took home the Oscar. He had previously been nominated for his screenplay for Dodsworth, and had received a Pulitzer Prize for his play They Knew What They Wanted, which had been filmed twice, in 1928 and 1930, and would be remade in 1940, though it's best known as the play on which Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella was based. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 
Lamar Trotti, Young Mr. Lincoln.
Lamar Trotti
People expect this kind of historical drama/biopic to be stiff and boring. It isn't, thanks not only to Henry Fonda's terrific performance in the title role and John Ford's direction, but also to Trotti's screenplay, which focuses on the backwoods lawyer's defense of two young men accused of murder. A former journalist, Trotti came to Hollywood in 1932 and went to work at 20th Century-Fox, where he spent most of his career. In 1939 alone, he wrote the screenplays for The Story of Alexander Graham Bell and Drums Along the Mohawk, as well as Young Mr. Lincoln, all of which reflect his deep interest in American history. He won an Oscar for Wilson, and was nominated again for There's No Business Like Show Business.
Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln 
 (Screenplay)
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder

Walter Reisch
This was the first of seven writing nominations for Brackett and twelve writing nominations for Wilder, the latter a long-held record until Woody Allen surpassed him on the way to racking up his fifteen writing nominations. Reisch accrued four nominations, and shared an Oscar with Brackett for the 1953 Titanic. Brackett won two more Oscars in collaboration with Wilder on Sunset Blvd. and The Lost Weekend. And Wilder added another writing win in his post-Brackett collaboration with I.A.L. Diamond on The Apartment. (Wilder also picked up producing and directing Oscars, bringing his total to six, plus an Irving Thalberg award.) Starting in 1938, Brackett and Wilder collaborated on thirteen screenplays -- a remarkable pairing, considering that Brackett was from a patrician family that traced its roots in America back to the seventeenth century and Wilder had arrived in the United States in 1933, fleeing the Nazi threat to his native Austria. Their collaboration was sometimes strained, and it ended in 1950 after their success with Sunset Blvd.  Brackett then turned his attention primarily to producing, though he reunited with Reisch on several screenplays, including The Mating Season, The Model and the Marriage Broker, and Niagara. Reisch had met his fellow Austrian Jew, Wilder, in Germany, where they both worked for the leading film company, UFA (Universum Film AG). He left Germany for Austria, but the Anschluss forced him to move to London, where he worked for a while with Alexander Korda before being hired by MGM. Much admired for his ability to solve problems of plotting and characterization, he remained at MGM until 1948, then reunited with Brackett at 20th Century-Fox. In addition to his work with Brackett and Wilder, he was also nominated for the screenplays for Comrade X and Gaslight.

Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka 

No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Best Director, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940
The nominees were ... 

It almost had to go to Fleming, even though much of the movie was directed by George Cukor, Sam Wood, and a number of second-unit directors including William Cameron Menzies. And every foot of the movie was overseen minutely by David O. Selznick. Cukor began it, but for a variety of reasons, including the fact that both Selznick and Cukor realized that he was the wrong man for so huge a project, he was replaced by Fleming, who was a close friend of Clark Gable's. Fleming had begun his career as a cameraman and became a cinematographer under the pioneers Allan Dwan and D.W. Griffith. He turned director in the 1920s, working with Douglas Fairbanks, among others. His best-known pre-GWTW films were Red Dust, Captains Courageous, and Test Pilot, all of which suggested that he was better equipped to handle action sequences than the stage-trained Cukor. But the task proved burdensome for Fleming, too, especially the constant barrage of quibbles and changes from Selznick, and for about a month in mid-filming he was replaced by Wood. Although he also received credit as the director of the second most famous movie of 1939, The Wizard of Oz, that, too, had multiple directors, including Cukor again, as well as Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, and, for the Kansas sequences, King Vidor. Fleming's post-Oscar career was relatively undistinguished.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Ernst Lubitsch
Greta Garbo requested Lubitsch, the master of sophisticated comedy, as director of Ninotchka, and she gave one of her greatest performances for him, sometimes clearly parodying her moody, masked image in serious roles. She was insecure about her ability to play comedy, especially the scene in which she becomes drunk on champagne, and insisted on having the set closed to non-essential personnel. Contemporaries recall that she was happy with the film, but years later she told others that Lubitsch was "a vulgar little man" and that she hadn't enjoyed working with him. He had been an actor in Germany before turning director, and also wrote screenplays, which he continued to do occasionally after he came to the United States in 1922.
Garbo laughs in Ninotchka


No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Best Supporting Actress, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940


The nominees were ... 

Hattie McDaniel with the plaque that supporting players were given instead of statuettes. Shortly before her death in 1952, it was presented to Howard University in Washington, D.C., but it has disappeared. 
Whatever one may say about the racial attitudes embodied in the character of Mammy, the role provided McDaniel with acting opportunities and screen time rarely granted to black performers of the era. Born in Kansas, she had to be trained in the dialect needed for the part. She began her career as a singer, a talent she rarely had a chance to use on screen, except in the 1936 Show Boat. Otherwise, both before and after Gone With the Wind, she was stuck playing maids, often, as in Alice Adams, making even those stereotypical parts memorable. She was the first black performer to be nominated for an Oscar, and for more than half a century, until Whoopi Goldberg won for Ghost, the only black woman to win an Academy Award for acting. On the other hand, McDaniel was not allowed to attend the premiere of GWTW in Atlanta, and her photograph did not appear in the souvenir program.

Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind 

No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Best Actress, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940


The nominees were ... 
Vivien Leigh with her Gone With the Wind Oscar
Leigh's win was pretty much a foregone conclusion, especially after the celebrated nationwide hunt David O. Selznick mounted for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. It was mostly a publicity stunt, since Selznick had no intention of casting an untried actress in such a key role. Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, and Joan Bennett came closest to getting the role out of the roster of famous also-rans: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, Margaret Sullavan, Tallulah Bankhead, Miriam Hopkins, Ann Sheridan, Anita Louise, Lana Turner, Frances Dee, and Catherine Campbell (the future mother of Patty Hearst). Leigh wanted the part from the moment she read the novel and heard it was to be filmed. She was not a complete unknown; her films Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford had been widely seen. While filming the former, she fell in love with her co-star, Laurence Olivier, and came to the States to be with him during the filming of Wuthering Heights. They married in 1940 after both were divorced. The legend (too good to be entirely true, so it probably isn't) has it that she was first brought to Selznick's attention by his brother, the agent Myron Selznick, during the filming of the burning of Atlanta, which Selznick decided to go ahead with even though the casting wasn't yet complete. That scene was shot on December 10, 1938, but Leigh wasn't finally set for the role until somewhere around Christmas Day. Her performance easily eclipsed even her formidable competition for the Oscar, yet between Scarlett O'Hara and her other great Oscar-winning role as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire more than a decade later, Leigh made only a handful of films. The war, which she and Olivier spent in England, is partly to blame, as is her delicate physical and mental health, but Selznick, to whom she was under contract, also has to be blamed for not providing her with suitable roles.
Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara

No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Best Picture, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

Okay, we can now argue about this one after years in which it was venerated as the greatest Hollywood movie. Is Gone With the Wind really a better picture than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, or The Wizard of Oz, to name four other nominees from this Hollywood annus mirabilis? Does its legacy of racist sentimentality about the Old South or its retrograde attitude toward Rhett's spousal rape of Scarlett not vitiate the award? Perhaps. But GWTW remains an iconic film for all its faults. It gave the great Hattie McDaniel one of the few truly memorable roles for a black actor in this era, and producer David O. Selznick did make attempts to tone down the racism of Margaret Mitchell's novel. And it's difficult to name a more fascinating film performance than Vivien Leigh's Scarlett.

No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)