Robert Wise

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Robert Wise
Born 10 September 1914
Winchester, Indiana, USA
Died 14 September 2005, (age 91)
Los Angeles, California, USA

Robert Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was a sound effects editor, film editor, and Academy Award-winning American film producer and director. Among his many famous films are The Sand Pebbles, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Hindenburg, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Andromeda Strain, The Set-Up, The Haunting, and The Body Snatcher. Wise's working period spanned the 1930s to the 1990s.

Often contrasted with contemporary "auteur" directors such as Stanley Kubrick who tended to bring a distinctive directorial "look" to a particular genre, Wise is famously viewed to have allowed his (sometimes studio assigned) story dictate style. Later critics such as Martin Scorsese would go on to expand that characterization, insisting that despite Wise's notorious workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan. Through whatever means, Wise's approach would bring him critical success as a director in many different traditional film genres: from horror to noir to Western to war films to Science Fiction, to musical and drama, with many repeat hits within each genre. Wise's tendency towards professionalism led to a degree of preparedness which, though nominally motivated by studio budget constraints, nevertheless advanced the moviemaking art, with many Academy Award-winning films the result.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born in Winchester, Indiana, Wise began his movie career at RKO as a sound and music editor, but he soon grew to being nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing for Citizen Kane in 1941: Wise was that film's last living crew member.

Though Wise worked only as editor on Citizen Kane, it is likely that while working on the film he would become familiar with the optical printer techniques employed by Linwood Dunn, inventor of the practical optical printer, to produce effects for Citizen Kane such as the image projected in the broken snowglobe which falls from Kane's hand as he dies. Though Wise was never known as a special-effects-driven director, echos of this 1940s high-tech special effects technology were to emerge in several of his important later films, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Wise could also make a movie special in the use of technique borrowed from one genre but applied to another genre: in his hands, a science fiction movie might acquire mood from a "haunted house" film, and vice versa. Wise sought never to waste the time (or salary) of the talented people who produced his features: the result was an impressively prolific series of films which showcase the talents of director, cast, and crew.

Wise attended Connersville High School in Connersville, Indiana, and its auditorium, the Robert E. Wise Center for Performing Arts, is named in his honor.

[edit] Wise becomes a director

First called as assistant director to shoot additional scenes for Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Wise took his first directing job with the stylish horror film The Curse of the Cat People in 1944, teaming with Hollywood horror producer/director Val Lewton, a collaboration which would produce several notable horror films, among them The Body Snatcher starting Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, a film which in its acting direction deliberately evoked the groundbreaking horror films of the 1930s, while presenting a psychological horror film more in tune with the uncertainty of the 1940s.

In 1947, Wise directed the Lawrence Tierney noir classic Born to Kill and two years later directed the boxing movie The Set-Up, where his direction of the real-time setting got him noticed. Wise's use and mention of time in this film would find echos in later noir films such as Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

In the 1950s, Wise proved adept in several genres, from the science fiction of The Day the Earth Stood Still to the melodramatic So Big, to Susan Hayward's Oscar winner in I Want to Live!, for which he was nominated for Best Director.

In 1961, teamed with Jerome Robbins, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for West Side Story, which he also produced. He repeated this achievement in 1965 with The Sound of Music. In the 1970s he directed such films as The Andromeda Strain, The Hindenburg, the horror film Audrey Rose, and the first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In 1989 he directed Rooftops, his last theatrical feature film.

Even in his twilight years, Wise continued to be active in productions of DVD versions to his films, even making public appearances promoting those films.

Wise was a past president of both the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6338 Hollywood Blvd.

After suffering a heart attack at home, Wise was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, where he died from heart failure. He died on 14 September 2005, four days after his birthday.

[edit] Academy Awards and nominations

Awards
Preceded by
Billy Wilder
for The Apartment		 Academy Award for Best Director
1961
for West Side Story
with Jerome Robbins		 Succeeded by
David Lean
for Lawrence of Arabia
Preceded by
George Cukor
for My Fair Lady		 Academy Award for Best Director
1965
for The Sound of Music		 Succeeded by
Fred Zinnemann
for A Man for All Seasons

[edit] Filmography

[edit] As director / producer

[edit] As editor / assistant editor

[edit] External links

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