Preston Sturges
Preston Sturges (1898 – 1959) was an American playwright, screenwriter, film director, producer, inventor, restaurateur.
First director to use the "written and directed by" credit (for The Great McGinty), which won the first "Best Original Screenplay" Academy Award.
His mother was very friendly with Isadora Duncan.
He invented kiss-proof lipstick.
An actress whom he was dating in the late 1920s revealed to him that she was only in the relationship for research purposes--she was writing a play, and to her, (said she) he was "as a guinea pig is to a scientist." Not long after that, his first produced play, The Guinea Pig, opened on Broadway in 1929.
Sturges directed McGinty, wrote and directed Christmas in July, wrote and directed The Lady Eve, and opened a restaurant in 1940. He won an Oscar for McGinty, wrote and directed Sullivan's Travels, and wrote The Palm Beach Story before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.
"Unless television gets into the hands of the same real estate men and candy butchers who inherited sound film from the movies, it will discharge the obligation that talking film failed to do and will diffuse to the smallest hamlets in the furthest part of the world the treasures of literature and of music."