Born Today February 13: George Fitzmaurice

1885-1940

French born director George Fitzmaurice (occasionally spelled FitzMaurice in a few sources) was born on this day in Paris. Often described as a "silent film director," Fitzmaurice's career actually continued well into the sound era.  "Fitz" as he was affectionately known got his start as a set designer; and he started directing films in 1914. Working for the American arm of the French Pathé Frères, he directed When Rome Ruled, a feature length historical drama set in North Africa; the film was released in August of 1914. He made just two more short films for Frères in 1914 (he also had a hand in writing scenarios for a further two films for them that year--one of which he may have directed), before jumping ship to an the American production company George Kleine Productions.  His first film for them was the comedy Stop Thief!, based on the popular Carlyle Moore play, and released in February of 1915.  In the middle of that year, he was instrumental in the founding the production enterprise Astra Film Corp., directing their very first release: Via Wireless (1915) starring Gail Kane. Fitzmaurice was married for a time to screenwriter Ouida Bergére (later more famous as Mrs. Basil Rathbone), and his next film was one of her adaptations for the screen: At Bay (November 1915). Bergére began to write scripts completely from scratch, usually romantic melodramas, having a director with whom she was romantically involved (they did not wed until 1918) meant that her work was going to get produced. This had the added effect of "typecasting," if you will, Fitzmaurice as a talented director of romances. This would also eventually make him a highly celebrated director in Hollywood. Astra became defunct in 1920, but Fitzmaurice had already moved west and to Paramount in that later half of 1919. Actually his first films for the studio were filmed in the New York area (well, one was filmed in Miami), with The Witness for the Defense (September 1919) being the very first. In the early 1920's, he also directed a couple of films for the company in Europe, the most historically interesting is the now lost Three Live Ghosts (1922), filmed at Islington Studios in London and had an art director by the name of Alfred Hitchcock.  In 1923, he directed Pola Negri in Bella Donna, a romantic drama with partial sound by De Forest Phonofilm; one of the earliest large feature productions to have sound attached.  He next directed her in the fully silent remake of The Cheat (1923) with Jack Holt (first made by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915).  It was also his last Paramount film. He moved over to the Samuel Goldwyn company and directed The Eternal City (1923), a war drama set during World War I (this is one of those films happily discovered to have survived, despite thought permanently lost for decades).  Through a partnership with Goldwyn, he was able to found his own George Fitzmaurice Productions; directing and bringing out the melodrama A Thief in Paradise, starring Ronald Colman and Doris Kenyon, in June of 1925.  Colman would become a frequent actor in Fitzmaurice productions over the next few years--some of his famous appearances with Vilma Bánky came in Fitz directions. In 1928 he began directing films that had sound, and though these were partial silents, they were his first films with sound in the era when sound was becoming the norm. One of these--Lilac Time--starred a young Gary Cooper opposite Colleen Moore.  While his first full talkie was the mystery thriller The Locked Door, starring Barbara Stanwyck. His last film of the decade--made for Warner Bros.--was also a talkie: Tiger Rose was a western romantic action film complete with musical originals; it starred Lupe Valez and Monte Blue and was filmed on location in Lake Arrowhead, California. But there is one film that Fitzmaurice is extremely famous for directing--in part it's that the film's superstar died before it's release. Fitzmaurice directed The Son of the Sheik in 1926; it would turn out to be Rudolph Valentino's last film. By the turn of the decade, he was still very famous for this film and that kept in demand.  His first film of the new decade was the romantic thriller The Bad One starring Dolores del Rio; while his most famous film from the decade is Raffles again starring Ronald Colman and released in July of 1930. In all, he directed nearly twenty films between 1930 and 1938, though on several he went uncredited and one, Nana, he was fired from by Goldwyn and replaced with a woman: the now legendary Dorothy Arzner. Fitzmaurice managed to direct one film in 1940, the diamond intrigue crime drama Adventure in Diamonds, which was released in March.  It would turn out to be his last film; he died at the age of 55 on the 13th of June that same year. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale--his grave marker put his birth year at 1887, but that is generally accepted to be incorrect. Fitzmaurice did direct one film that was nominated for an Oscar, and that picture came in the 1920's. His romantic partial silent The Barker (December 1928) was included in nominations for the 1930 Academy Awards, nominated for Best Lead Actress for Betty Compson. Fitzmaurice's second marriage was to actress Diana Kane (the sister of actresses Lois Wilson and Connie Lewis), they had one daughter and remained married until his untimely death.

[source: AJM (Find A Grave)]

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Born Today July 8: Arthur C. Miller

1895-1970

[apologies for lack proper editing, I am experiencing computer difficulties, but would like to publish this anyway.]

One of the most well known of the early cinematographers of the Fort Lee period of film making in the United States, Arthur Charles Miller was born on this day in Roslyn, New York. During his lifetime he was a seven time Oscar nominee and a three time winner in the 1940's for his cinematography work; but arguably his most famous work today came from the silent era. His birthplace of Roslyn is located on the northwestern edge of Long Island in Nassau County, this meant it's proximity to New York City saw a large number of residents finding work in the city, especially during the early 20th century, when public transportation exploded in the area. Miller was just 13 years of age when he found work in the new motion picture industry.  This came about quite by accident; as he recounted much later in life, that he knew how to ride horses and was working for a local horse dealer who knew that Miller could ride bare back--he soon found himself on a location shoot on a golf course in Brooklyn.  This is how he made the aquaintance of then cinematographer Fred Balshofer. His first credit comes on as an assistant camera operator on The True Heart of an Indian in 1909, on which Balshofer was responsible for the outdoor scenes shot in New Jersey (he also co-directed the short). Miller was just 14 years old (Note: it is highly probable that his has other credits earlier than this, as we still do not know what the film was that he was riding the horse for in 1908). Even more impressively at the age of 14, Balshofer allowed Miller to operate a camera all on his own for part of another film that Balshofer co-directed, thus giving Miller his first cinematographer credit: that film was Romance of a Fishermaid (1909). Just two years later, at the age of 16, he earned his first solo credit in cinematography for directing the photography of the Lois Weber film A Heroine of '76 (1911). The following year, at the age of 17, he was the DP on a Mack Sennett film at Keystone: At Coney Island (1912)--a film starring Sennett and Mabel Normand. What Miller is most remembered for in regards to his work in silents, are the serials that he worked on, the first of which was The Perils of Pauline (1914).  What is astonishing is that Pathé hired him for the entire 20 part serial as the sole cinematographer on the project when he was only 19! His reputation for being an expert at shooting tough on locations was solidified by the project; it is no wonder, then that he was selected four years later by Astra as one of two cinematographers on the now famously lost serial The House of Hate. He was more than ready to shoot even the most difficult of outdoor locations, even cliff sides (see below).

Very famous still from The House of Hate filming on Cliffhanger Point in New Jersey near Fort Lee. (And yes, this is where we get the term "cliffhanger")

In the meantime, he had worked on several George Fitzmaurice films, both at Pathé and Astra. One of those films was Blind Man's Luck (1917) was written by George B. Seitz, who would be the director on House of Hate.  After the filming for Hate concluded, he went back to being principle director of photography for Fitzmaurice, who was by this time working with his screenwriting wife Ouida Bergère.  When Fitzmaurice moved to Hollywood and signed at contract in 1919 with Paramount, Miller went with him.  Their first film for the studio The Witness for the Defense, a solidly melodramatic outing, starred Elsie Ferguson opposite Vernon Steele. His camera work at Paramount with a director other than Fitzmaurice was on another melodrama His House in Order (1920) directed by Hugh Ford.  When, by 1924 Fitzmaurice had gone over to the Samuel Goldwyn studio, again Miller followed, with The Cheat, a 1923 Pola Negri vehicle, being their first them there (in between studios, they worked on another Negri film that was a special sound project with the DeForest Phonofilm system: Bella Donna also in 1923).  When the George Fitzmaurice Productions company got going, the duo made His Supreme Moment in 1925; the film featured two scenes in the new technicolor process (known today as "2-strip Technicolor"). This would be the last film he shot with the director--his longest professional relationship to date; he then moved on to work with director Paul Sloane and the DeMille brothers. In 1927 he got the chance to team up with Lois Weber again, with her firmly in charge of the production this time around (!); that film was The Angel of Broadway and featured art direction by Mitchell Leisen. The first film that he worked on that had a major sound system attatched to it's production was the partial silent Annapolis a dramedy directed by Christy Cabanne utilizing the RCA Photophone System for sound effects. This change is photographic technique at the time was pretty fast and furious for DP's that wished to remain in the industry with the coming of full sound. Working with films with sound effects was one thing, photographing a film with talking sequences was quite another. Forturnately for Miller, he had experience with this.  The first film that he worked on with "modern" talking sequences was appropriately titled The Spieler, which despite it's obvious German origins, had come to denote a "fast talkers" or swindlers by way of Australia. The film, featuring Alan Hale in the lead, was released in December of 1928.  He never worked on a fully silent film again. His next two films would prove that he had the ability to adapt well to this environment: The Bellamy Trial (a "3/4" sound film) was ironically set on Long Island not far from where he hailed from and Strange Cargo (a full talkie) was by all accounts a film at least 10 years ahead of it's time, thanks in no small part to his photographic approach. Both films were released in 1929.  He worked on four more films in 1929, ironically he wound right back up at Pathé Exchange, where he had gotten such an early start as a young adult.  His last film of that decade was His First Command, released at the very end of the year/decade. He was already at work in 1929 on the first of his work to be released in 1930, shooting Officer O'Brien in time for it's release in February of 1930. It was not long however before the financial crisis that started on Wall Street in 1929 quickly caught up with the movie industry in Hollywood.  This would be his last film with Pathé--end of an era. [Please don't comment of the later RKO Pathé stuff...just not really the same company]. He then knocked around in several pre-code films in the very early 30's at a couple of different studios, including RKO--featuring talking films with some familiar faces including Pola Negri. He managed to ink a deal with Fox, which was in a position to concalitade it's power in tough times and his career was again on a solid footing. He was still with Fox when he was first nominated for an Oscar for The Rains Came and when he won his first Oscar for How Green Was My Valley. Miller would be nominated 5 more time, winning two more Oscars. All of his nominations came during a time when the Oscars awarded seperated wins to black & white and color cinematography.  Miller was nominated only once for a color film, all of his wins came for black and white film stock shoots. Miller retired from active film making after shooting The Prowler, which was released in May of 1951. He would serve as the President of the American Society of Cinematographers, of which he was a founding member in 1918,  from 1954-1956. Though he health kept him from shooting, he was active in the industry throughtout the the rest of his life. He penned a very important book with Fred Balshofer entitled One Reel A Week about their experience in the first studio hubs in the New York/New Jersey area before the move to Hollywood. Miller passed away on the 13 of the July in Hollywood, just five days after his 75th birthday. His ashes are interred at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

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