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King Vidor
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From All Movie Guide: Born in Galveston, TX, King Vidor was the son of a wealthy lumber manufacturer. He became interested in movies -- then a brand new form of entertainment -- as a young boy, and later took a job as a ticket-taker at the local theater, where he subsequently became a fill-in projectionist. Vidor took this opportunity to watch the same movies over and over, learning from what he saw and deciding that he could do as good a job as most of the people whose films were up on the screen. After working as an amateur photographer, he began shooting newsreel material of events in his area of Texas and selling it to newsreel producers. It was after his marriage to the former Florence Arto in 1915 that he decided to head out to the then newly formed film colony in Hollywood. The couple entered the motion-picture business, but Florence Vidor was the far more successful of the two at first, starting out as a bit player and moving up to supporting roles in films such as A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and into starring roles in the late teens and 1920s.
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Committed to the most unyielding and almost brutally positive American determination, King Vidor was a man of considerable artistic ambition who came of age in a period when movies were a new medium and wide-open for individual points of view. He made films glorifying the effects of Western civilisation and its contents, detailing how ordinary men are made extraordinary through their fight against the neutral destructiveness of nature. His men were winners who loved to work (with one key exception), and their will power became practically monolithic as Vidor's career advanced. There's a big difference between Tom Keene's charismatic farm co-operative leader John in Our Daily Bread (1934) and the often-charmless tunnel vision of Brian Donlevy's Steven Dangos in American Romance (1944), to say nothing of the nearly dictatorial self-confidence of Gary Cooper's Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (1949). In this way, Vidor's men became more unlikable and scarier as his country itself veered away from the proletarian dreams of the 1930s and into the consumer culture of the '50s and beyond. All his men work against things: war, consuming lust, the land, the illnesses of the body, bourgeois routine, lost love.
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The King Vidor collection consists of photographs, scripts, props, publicity materials, production reports, studio memos, and other production materials primarily from the 1941 film H. M. Pulham, Esquire. Vidor donated the Pulham materials to The University of Texas Drama Department in conjunction with his guest lecture on movie making at the university on December 3, 1941. The materials were intended to form the nucleus of a program for the study of the production and direction of motion pictures, organized by Drama Department Chairman James Parke, Interstate Theatres President Karl Hoblitzelle, and Paramount Pictures Executive Vice President Y. Frank Freeman. Also in the collection is a typescript of Vidor's 1936 film The Texas Rangers and an accompanying photo of Vidor, and four additional photographs of Vidor dating from around 1924. The materials are arranged by volume, with H. M. Pulham, Esquire constituting almost the entire collection. The two Texas Rangers items and the four circa 1924 photographs are housed at the end of the collection.
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Rennahan, Ray Filming of Duel in the sun oral history transcript: recollections of Ray Rennahan, Lee Garmes, and King Vidor [Los Angeles]: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, c1969. --BANC: BANC MSS 72/180 c; Non-circulating; may be used only in The Bancroft Library.
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King Vidor began work in Hollywood as a company clerk for Universal, submitting original scripts under the pseudonym Charles K. Wallis. (Universal employees weren't allowed to submit original work to the studio.) Vidor eventually confessed his wrongdoing and was fired as a clerk, only to be rehired as a comedy writer. Within days, he lost this job as well when Universal discontinued comedy production.
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[I]n fact this theme is at the heart of most Vidor movies. In An American Romance, for example, a mother and her child watch a butterfly emerge from a cocoon, and the mother says,
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King Vidor