Preston Sturges
Preston Sturges
Preston Sturgeswas an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. In 1941, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film The Great McGinty, his first of three nominations in the category...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 August 1898
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
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The United States owes a great debt to its inventors. Far from being grateful to them, it places every obstruction in their way and makes it enormously difficult to secure a patent.
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Our gymnasium was remarkable and had more stuff in it than one could dream up in a nightmare. Furthermore, every boy had to use every piece of it during gymnasium class.
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I suppose they're like the I.R.S. You move once and they never send you your refund check.
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I suppose they're like the I.R.S., ... You move once and they never send you your refund check.
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I thought for a month or so along the lines of what I call Monsieur Beaucaire in modern clothes. By that, I mean a hero who is believed by all to be a villain but who, in the end, is introduced as a man of great honor with a long list of decorations.
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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.
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The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.
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Much as I disliked the un-American idea of marrying a lady with a dowry, I must admit that little Mrs. Godfrey's little private income put everything in a faintly different light.
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The camera must point at the exact spot the audience wishes to look at any given moment. To find that spot is absurdly easy: you only have to remember where you were looking at the time the scene was made.
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For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing - some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey - shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate.
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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.
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Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.
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I compared pooh-poohers of the movies to the myopics who used to holler, 'Get a horse!' when an early automobile exploded by.
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I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.