Gregory La Cava

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Gregory La Cava (March 10, 1892 – March 1, 1952) was an American film director of the 1930s.

He was born in Towanda, Pennsylvania and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League. Around 1913, he started doing odd jobs at the studio of Raoul Barré. By 1915 he was an animator on the Animated Grouch Chasers series.

Towards the end of 1915, William Randolph Hearst decided to create an animation studio to promote the comic strips printed in his newspapers. He called the new company International Film Service, and he hired La Cava to run it (for double what he was making with Barré).

La Cava's first employee was his co-worker at the Barré Studio, Frank Moser. Another was his fellow student in Chicago, Grim Natwick (later to achieve fame at Disney). As he developed more and more of Hearst's comics into cartoon series, he came to put semi-independent units in charge of each, leading to the growth of individual styles.

La Cava also had the significant advantage over other studios of an unlimited budget: Hearst's business sense completely broke down when it came to his Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial and the "living comic strips" they contained. La Cava's main fault as a producer and director was that his cartoons were too clearly animated comic strips, hampered by speech balloons when the rival Bray Studio was creating more effective series with original characters. He was apparently aware of this fault, and he had his animators study Charlie Chaplin films to improve their timing and characterization. But he didn't have time to achieve very much, because in July of 1918 Hearst's bankers caught up with him and International Film Service was shut down.

Hearst still wanted his characters animated, so he licensed various studios to continue the IFS series. La Cava and most of the IFS staff got jobs with John Terry's studio (no surprise, since John Terry himself was an IFS alumnus). This only lasted a few months, then John Terry's studio went out of business. The animators were immediately hired by Goldwyn-Bray (as the Bray Studio was now known), but La Cava was not, since Goldwyn-Bray had several producers of his own and La Cava was not interested in starting over. Instead, he moved west to Hollywood.

By 1922, La Cava had become a live-action director of two-reel comedies, the direct competitor to animated films. Among the actors he directed in the silent era were:

Bebe Daniels (Feel My Pulse, 1928)
Richard Dix
W. C. Fields (So's Your Old Man, 1926 and Running Wild, 1927)

He had worked his way up to features by the time sound arrived, and it is for his films of the 1930s (both comedic and serious) that he is best known today:

The Half Naked Truth (1932)
The Age of Consent (1932) for RKO, which starred Richard Cromwell, Eric Linden, and Dorothy Wilson.
Bed of Roses (1932) with Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton
Gabriel Over the White House (1933) with Walter Huston
What Every Woman Knows (1934)
Private Worlds (1935)
My Man Godfrey (1936, nominated for the Best Director Academy Award)
Stage Door (1937, also nominated for Best Director) with Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers
The Primrose Path (1940)

Gregory died 9 days before his 60th birthday on March 1, 1952 in Malibu, California.

[edit] References

Joe Adamson; The Walter Lantz Story; G. P. Putnam's Sons; ISBN 0-399-13096-9 (1985)
Donald Crafton; Before Mickey: The Animated Film: 1898-1928; The University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-11667-0 (1982, 1993)
Leonard Maltin; Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons; Penguin Books; ISBN 0-452-25993-2 (1980, 1987)