Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel

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Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel

The extraordinary lifeâ€”the firstâ€”of the legendary, undercelebrated Hollywood director known in his day as â€œWild Billâ€ (and he was!) Wellman, whose eighty-two movies (six of them uncredited), many of them iconic; many of them sharp, cold, brutal; others poetic, moving; all of them a lesson in close-up art, ranged from adventure and gangster pictures to comedies, aviation, romances, westerns, and searing social dramas.
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Among his iconic pictures: the pioneering World War I epic Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture), Public Enemy (the toughest gangster picture of them all), Nothing Sacred, the original A Star Is Born, Beggars of Life, The Call of the Wild, The Ox-Bow Incident, Battleground, The High and the Mighty...
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David O. Selznick called him â€œone of the motion picturesâ€™ greatest craftsmen.â€
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Robert Redford described him as â€œfeisty, independent, self-taught, and self-made. He stood his ground and fought his battles for artistic integrity, never wavering, always clear in his film sense.â€
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Wellman directed Hollywoodâ€™s biggest stars for three decades, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Clint Eastwood. It was said he directed â€œlike a general trying to break out of a beachhead.â€ He made pictures with such noted producers as Darryl F. Zanuck, Nunnally Johnson, Jesse Lasky, and David O. Selznick.
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Here is a revealing, boisterous portrait of the handsome, tough-talking, hard-drinking, uncompromising maverick (he called himself a â€œcrazy bastardâ€)â€”juvenile delinquent; professional ice-hockey player as a kid; World War I flying ace at twenty-one in the Lafayette Flying Corps (the Lafayette Escadrille), crashing more than six planes (â€œWe only had four instruments, none of which worked. And no parachutes . . . Greatest goddamn acrobatics you ever saw in your lifeâ€)â€”whose own life story was more adventurous and more unpredictable than anything in the movies. Wellman was a wing-walking stunt pilot in barnstorming air shows, recipient of the Croix de Guerre with two Gold Palm Leaves and five United States citations; a bad actor but good studio messenger at Goldwyn Pictures who worked his way up from assistant cutter; married to five women, among them Marjorie Crawford, aviatrix and polo player; silent picture star Helene Chadwick; and Dorothy Coonan, Busby Berkeley dancer, actress, and mother of his seven children.
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Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer, called Wellman â€œa terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-donâ€™t-know-what. David had a real weakness for him. I didnâ€™t share it.â€ Yet she believed enough in Wellmanâ€™s vision and cowritten script about Hollywood to persuade her husband to produce A Star Is Born, which Wellman directed.
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After he took over directing Tarzan Escapes at MGM, Wellman went to Louis B. Mayer and asked to make another Tarzan picture on his own.
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â€œWhat are you talking about? Itâ€™s beneath your dignity,â€ said Mayer.
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â€œTo hell with that,â€ said Wellman, â€œI havenâ€™t got any dignity.â€
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Now William Wellman, Jr., drawing on his fatherâ€™s unpublished letters, diaries, and unfinished memoir, gives us the first full portrait of the manâ€”boy, flyer, husband, father, director, artist. Here is a portrait of a profoundly American spirit and visionary, a manâ€™s man who was able to put into cinematic storytelling the most subtle and fulsome of feeling, a man feared, respected, and loved.

Country	USA
Author	William Wellman Jr.
Binding	Hardcover
Brand	Pantheon
EAN	9780307377708
Edition	F First Edition
Format	Deckle Edge
ISBN	0307377709
Label	Pantheon
Manufacturer	Pantheon
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	656
PublicationDate	2015-04-07
Publisher	Pantheon
ReleaseDate	2015-04-07
Studio	Pantheon

Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel

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