William A. Wellman(1896-1975)
- Director
- Writer
- Producer
William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the
original A Star Is Born (1937),
was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a
nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life
personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th of
February in Brookline, MA, Wellman was the great-great-great
grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of
Independence. Wellman's father was a stockbroker and his mother, the
former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland. Despite an upper-middle-class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as
an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also
enjoyed joyriding in stolen cars at nights.
Cecilia Wellman served as a probation officer for "wayward boys"
(juvenile delinquents) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and was
such a success in her field that she was asked to address Congress on
the subject of delinquency. One of her charges was her own son, as the
young Bill was kicked out of school at the age of 17 for
hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He
tried making a living as a candy salesman and a cotton salesman, but
failed. He worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control
of a truck and driving it through the side of a barn. Eventually he
wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts. While playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, an actor
named Douglas Fairbanks took
note of him. Impressed by Wellman's good looks and the figure he cut on
ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar suggested to him that he
had what it took to become a movie actor. Wellman's dream was to become
an aviator, but since his father "didn't have enough money for me to
become a flier in the regular way . . .I went into a war to become a
flier."
When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle,
Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he
learned to fly. In France he served as a pilot with the famous
Lafayette Flying Corps (better known as the Lafayette Escadrille),
where he won his nickname "Wild Bill" due to his devil-may-care style
in the air. He and fellow pilot Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player,
were in the Black Cat group. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft
fire and injured during the landing of his plane, which had lost its
tail section. Out of 222 Escadrille pilots 87 were killed, but Wellman
was fated to serve out the duration of the war. In the spring of 1918
he was recruited by the US Army Air Corps, joining "because I was
broke, and they were trying to get us in." Commissioned an officer, he
was sent back to the US and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego,
CA, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.
Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Fairbanks' polo
fields to spend the weekend. Fairbanks told the
returning hero that he would help him break into the movies when the war was over, and he was
as good as his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast
him as the juvenile in
The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919)
and as a young officer in
Evangeline (1919), but acting was
something Wellman grew to hate, a hatred he later transferred to actors
in his employ. He was fired by fellow macho director
Raoul Walsh from "Evangeline" for slapping
the lead actress, who Wellman didn't know was Walsh's wife. Disgusted
with acting, Wellman told Fairbanks he wanted to be a director, and
Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business. It was a
purely financial decision, he later recalled, as directors made more
money than supporting actors at the time.
Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920 and he soon worked
his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an
assistant property man, property man, assistant director and
second-unit director before making his uncredited directorial debut
later that year at Fox with
Twins of Suffering Creek (1920)
starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film
B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman's
star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after). Wellman
later remembered the film as awful, along with such other B-Westerns as
Cupid's Fireman (1923), starring
Buck Jones, whose westerns he began
directing in 1923 after serving his apprenticeship.
Fox Films gave Wellman his first directing credit in 1923 with the
Buck Jones western
Second Hand Love (1923) and, other than the Dustin Farnum picture
The Man Who Won (1923), he turned
out Jones pictures for the rest of his time at Fox. The studio fired
him in 1924 after he asked for a raise after completing
The Circus Cowboy (1924),
another Buck Jones film. Moving to Columbia, he helmed
When Husbands Flirt (1925),
then went over to MGM for the slapstick comedy
The Boob (1926) before landing at Famous
Players-Lasky (now known as Paramount Pictures after its distribution
unit), where he directed
You Never Know Women (1926)
and The Cat's Pajamas (1926).
It was as a contract director at the now renamed Paramount-Famous
Players-Lasky Corp. that he had his breakout hit, due to his flying
background. Paramount entrusted its epic WW I flying epic
Wings (1927) to Wellman, and the film went
on to become the first Academy Award-winning
best picture.
Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct "Wings". He also gave
himself a role as a German pilot, and flew one of the German planes
that landed and rolled over. The massive production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65
pilots and 165 aircraft. It also went over budget and
over schedule due to Wellman's perfectionism, and he came close to
being fired more than once. The film took a year to complete, but
when it was released it turned out to be one of the most financially
successful silent pictures ever released and helped put
Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally
cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. "Wings" and Wellman's
next flying picture,
The Legion of the Condemned (1928)--in which Cooper had a starring role--initiated the genre of the World
War One aviation movie, which included such famous works as
Howard Hughes'
Hell's Angels (1930) and
Howard Hawks'
The Dawn Patrol (1930). Despite
his success in bringing in the first Best Picture Oscar winner,
Paramount did not keep Wellman under contract.
Wellman's disdain for actors already was in full bloom by the time he
wrapped "Wings". Many actors appearing in his pictures intensely
disliked his method of bullying them to elicit an performance.
Wellman was a "man's man" who hated male actors due to their
narcissism, yet he preferred to work with them because he despised the
preparation that actresses had to go through with their make-up and
hairdressing before each scene. Wellman shot his films fast. The
hard-drinking director usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his
own lifestyle. He married five women, including a Ziegfeld Follies
showgirl, before settling down with
Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former
Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed
that Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself. She
appeared as a tomboy in
Wild Boys of the Road (1933),
a Depression-era social commentary picture made for the progressive
Warner Bros. studio (and which is a favorite of
Martin Scorsese). It came two years after
Wellman's masterpiece,
The Public Enemy (1931), one of
the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures and the
film that made James Cagney a superstar.
Scorsese says that Wellman's use of music in the film influenced his
own first gangster picture,
Mean Streets (1973) .
Wellman was as adept at comedy as he was at macho material, helming the
original A Star Is Born (1937)
(for which he won his only Oscar, for best original story) and the
biting satire
Nothing Sacred (1937)--both of
which starred Fredric March--for producer
David O. Selznick. Both movies were
dissections of the fame game, as was his satire
Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly
was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite
films.
During World War Two Wellman continued to make outstanding films,
including
The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)
and Story of G.I. Joe (1945),
and after the war he turned out another war classic,
Battleground (1949). In the 1950s
Wellman's best later films starred
John Wayne, including the influential
aviation picture
The High and the Mighty (1954),
for which he received his third and last best director Oscar
nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service,
Lafayette Escadrille (1958),
which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a
director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner
Bros.'
post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.
Other than David O. Selznick, not many people in Hollywood particularly liked the hell-raising iconoclast Wellman.
Louis B. Mayer's
daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, the
first wife of David O. Selznick, said that Wellman was "a terror, a
shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine
I-don't-know-what". The Directors Guild of America in 1973 honored him with its Lifetime
Achievement Award.
William Wellman died (from leukemia) in 1975.
original A Star Is Born (1937),
was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a
nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life
personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th of
February in Brookline, MA, Wellman was the great-great-great
grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of
Independence. Wellman's father was a stockbroker and his mother, the
former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland. Despite an upper-middle-class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as
an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also
enjoyed joyriding in stolen cars at nights.
Cecilia Wellman served as a probation officer for "wayward boys"
(juvenile delinquents) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and was
such a success in her field that she was asked to address Congress on
the subject of delinquency. One of her charges was her own son, as the
young Bill was kicked out of school at the age of 17 for
hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He
tried making a living as a candy salesman and a cotton salesman, but
failed. He worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control
of a truck and driving it through the side of a barn. Eventually he
wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts. While playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, an actor
named Douglas Fairbanks took
note of him. Impressed by Wellman's good looks and the figure he cut on
ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar suggested to him that he
had what it took to become a movie actor. Wellman's dream was to become
an aviator, but since his father "didn't have enough money for me to
become a flier in the regular way . . .I went into a war to become a
flier."
When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle,
Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he
learned to fly. In France he served as a pilot with the famous
Lafayette Flying Corps (better known as the Lafayette Escadrille),
where he won his nickname "Wild Bill" due to his devil-may-care style
in the air. He and fellow pilot Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player,
were in the Black Cat group. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft
fire and injured during the landing of his plane, which had lost its
tail section. Out of 222 Escadrille pilots 87 were killed, but Wellman
was fated to serve out the duration of the war. In the spring of 1918
he was recruited by the US Army Air Corps, joining "because I was
broke, and they were trying to get us in." Commissioned an officer, he
was sent back to the US and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego,
CA, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.
Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Fairbanks' polo
fields to spend the weekend. Fairbanks told the
returning hero that he would help him break into the movies when the war was over, and he was
as good as his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast
him as the juvenile in
The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919)
and as a young officer in
Evangeline (1919), but acting was
something Wellman grew to hate, a hatred he later transferred to actors
in his employ. He was fired by fellow macho director
Raoul Walsh from "Evangeline" for slapping
the lead actress, who Wellman didn't know was Walsh's wife. Disgusted
with acting, Wellman told Fairbanks he wanted to be a director, and
Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business. It was a
purely financial decision, he later recalled, as directors made more
money than supporting actors at the time.
Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920 and he soon worked
his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an
assistant property man, property man, assistant director and
second-unit director before making his uncredited directorial debut
later that year at Fox with
Twins of Suffering Creek (1920)
starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film
B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman's
star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after). Wellman
later remembered the film as awful, along with such other B-Westerns as
Cupid's Fireman (1923), starring
Buck Jones, whose westerns he began
directing in 1923 after serving his apprenticeship.
Fox Films gave Wellman his first directing credit in 1923 with the
Buck Jones western
Second Hand Love (1923) and, other than the Dustin Farnum picture
The Man Who Won (1923), he turned
out Jones pictures for the rest of his time at Fox. The studio fired
him in 1924 after he asked for a raise after completing
The Circus Cowboy (1924),
another Buck Jones film. Moving to Columbia, he helmed
When Husbands Flirt (1925),
then went over to MGM for the slapstick comedy
The Boob (1926) before landing at Famous
Players-Lasky (now known as Paramount Pictures after its distribution
unit), where he directed
You Never Know Women (1926)
and The Cat's Pajamas (1926).
It was as a contract director at the now renamed Paramount-Famous
Players-Lasky Corp. that he had his breakout hit, due to his flying
background. Paramount entrusted its epic WW I flying epic
Wings (1927) to Wellman, and the film went
on to become the first Academy Award-winning
best picture.
Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct "Wings". He also gave
himself a role as a German pilot, and flew one of the German planes
that landed and rolled over. The massive production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65
pilots and 165 aircraft. It also went over budget and
over schedule due to Wellman's perfectionism, and he came close to
being fired more than once. The film took a year to complete, but
when it was released it turned out to be one of the most financially
successful silent pictures ever released and helped put
Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally
cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. "Wings" and Wellman's
next flying picture,
The Legion of the Condemned (1928)--in which Cooper had a starring role--initiated the genre of the World
War One aviation movie, which included such famous works as
Howard Hughes'
Hell's Angels (1930) and
Howard Hawks'
The Dawn Patrol (1930). Despite
his success in bringing in the first Best Picture Oscar winner,
Paramount did not keep Wellman under contract.
Wellman's disdain for actors already was in full bloom by the time he
wrapped "Wings". Many actors appearing in his pictures intensely
disliked his method of bullying them to elicit an performance.
Wellman was a "man's man" who hated male actors due to their
narcissism, yet he preferred to work with them because he despised the
preparation that actresses had to go through with their make-up and
hairdressing before each scene. Wellman shot his films fast. The
hard-drinking director usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his
own lifestyle. He married five women, including a Ziegfeld Follies
showgirl, before settling down with
Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former
Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed
that Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself. She
appeared as a tomboy in
Wild Boys of the Road (1933),
a Depression-era social commentary picture made for the progressive
Warner Bros. studio (and which is a favorite of
Martin Scorsese). It came two years after
Wellman's masterpiece,
The Public Enemy (1931), one of
the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures and the
film that made James Cagney a superstar.
Scorsese says that Wellman's use of music in the film influenced his
own first gangster picture,
Mean Streets (1973) .
Wellman was as adept at comedy as he was at macho material, helming the
original A Star Is Born (1937)
(for which he won his only Oscar, for best original story) and the
biting satire
Nothing Sacred (1937)--both of
which starred Fredric March--for producer
David O. Selznick. Both movies were
dissections of the fame game, as was his satire
Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly
was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite
films.
During World War Two Wellman continued to make outstanding films,
including
The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)
and Story of G.I. Joe (1945),
and after the war he turned out another war classic,
Battleground (1949). In the 1950s
Wellman's best later films starred
John Wayne, including the influential
aviation picture
The High and the Mighty (1954),
for which he received his third and last best director Oscar
nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service,
Lafayette Escadrille (1958),
which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a
director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner
Bros.'
post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.
Other than David O. Selznick, not many people in Hollywood particularly liked the hell-raising iconoclast Wellman.
Louis B. Mayer's
daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, the
first wife of David O. Selznick, said that Wellman was "a terror, a
shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine
I-don't-know-what". The Directors Guild of America in 1973 honored him with its Lifetime
Achievement Award.
William Wellman died (from leukemia) in 1975.