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Robert Wise: Rko Studios
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Robert Wise was born as the youngest of three brothers. Through an odd job at RKO at the age of 19, the avid moviegoer came into film business. A head sound effects editor at the studio recognized Wise's talent, and made Wise his protégé.
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After an extensive and varied career as a distinguished American filmmaker, Robert Wise died on September 14, 2005. His professional beginnings are an archetypal rags-to-riches story. Wise, an Indiana native, was forced to leave college during the Depression. With an older brother working at RKO Pictures, Wise moved to California to become a messenger in the studio’s editing department. As a novice editor, he apprenticed in the music and sound-effects division. Wise’s talents were soon recognized by Orson Welles, who hired him to edit Citizen Kane (1941).
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Robert Earl Wise was born on Sept. 10, 1914, in Winchester, Ind., the son of a meatpacker and his wife. The Depression force him to quit college in 1933, and he headed for Hollywood, where his older brother, Dave, was an accountant at RKO. His brother helped him get a job as a messenger in the studio's editing department. Soon he was learning sound effects and music editing, and working his way up to film editing.
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Wise and Welles reunited for Welles's next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, but this time the collaboration ended less happily. Set in Indianapolis, the film was a complex family drama with an unsympathetic central character, and it tested badly among preview audiences. Executives at the financially troubled RKO panicked, demanded that the original 148-minute film be cut by about an hour, and brought in Wise to direct several new scenes that clarified the action; Welles was in South America, working on a documentary that was never finished; he felt that Wise had butchered the film, but Wise maintained that he had done the best he could under the circumstances. He was partially vindicated by the later reputation of The Magnificent Ambersons as one of the greatest of all American films, even in its shortened state. In the midst of this drama in 1942, Wise married actress Patricia Doyle. They had one son.
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At the time, Wise's brother David worked in the accounting department at RKO in Hollywood, and the Wise family encouraged Robert to seek employment there as well. Soon the impressive young Wise was offered a job as a porter in RKO's editing department. For a movie fan, this was a great place to be, and in his journeys between the studio's projection and cutting rooms, Wise absorbed the day-to-day workings of the studio.
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When Howard Hughes bought RKO in the late 1940s, he shut down production, but Wise was allowed to continue to shoot a boxing movie, "The Set-Up." An industrious and meticulous researcher, Wise spent a long period in an arena in Long Beach, researching the fight game. The film went on to win the Critics Prize at the Festival de Cannes. His most challenging research came for the death-house drama "I Want to Live!" his film about the last days of Barbara Graham, a prostitute who died in the gas chamber. The last scene was of Graham, played by Susan Hayward, in her cell the night before the execution.
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