King Vidor

Trivia

• President of the Screen Directors Guild.
• Survived the most horrific hurricane to ever hit the United States, the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston, Texas on September 8th, 1900. This tropical cyclone killed an estimated 6,000 people, fully one third of the population. Vidor wrote a fictional account of the storm entitled "Southern Storm" for the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine.
• Entered into Guinness World Records as having "The Longest Career As A Film Director", spanning 67 years beginning with Hurricane in Galveston (1913) in 1913 and ending with the documentary The Metaphor (1980) in 1980.
• Directed the black and white sequences (the Kansas scenes), including "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," in The Wizard of Oz (1939) when director Victor Fleming was forced to leave the production to move to Gone with the Wind (1939).
• Was obsessed by the unsolved murder of 1920s director William Desmond Taylor. He spent all of 1967 attempting to learn the identity of Taylor's killer and planned to turn the story into a movie.
• Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 1130-1136. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
• He had three daughters. His oldest, Suzanne, was born to his first wife Florence in 1919. With Eleanor Boardman he had daughters Antonia, born in 1927, and Belinda, born in June, 1930.
• Directed six different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Wallace Beery, Robert Donat, Barbara Stanwyck, Anne Shirley, Jennifer Jones and Lillian Gish. Beery won an Oscar for The Champ (1931/I).
• In 1978, he (co-presenter) accepted the Oscar for "Best Director" on behalf of Woody Allen, who wasn't present at the awards ceremony.
• Head of jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.

Quotes

• "In Hollywood, the cameraman light the star. In Europe, he lights the set."
• "The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen."