| Summary: | American motion picture director. Contains scripts (some unproduced), contracts, correspondence, scenarios, research on many of Hawks's motion pictures, family and business records, memorabilia, and home movies. Staunchly independent Howard Hawks began directing Hollywood genre motion pictures in the silent days. When he died in late 1977, he had achieved an international reputation and was widely respected by three generations of film makers and viewers of his films. His impact was particularly pronounced in France, where he influenced the New Wave--as an auteur-directeur, a filmmaker who is in control of every aspect of his productions, including the writing, which he did (or revised) as shooting progressed on the set. Hawks is perhaps best known for his action dramas about rugged men facing danger with camaraderie or individual courage, such as The Dawn Patrol(1930) and, in recent decades, John Wayne's biggest western hits. But his cameras--always at straight eye level--have also focused on zany comedies, such as Twentieth Century(1934), and private-detective melodramas, such as The Big Sleep(1946). In the United States, historians of cinema art and high-brow critics until recently tended to dismiss his work as mere entertainment, and he was content with that characterization, since he thought of his work as "fun," for himself as well as for audiences.Howard Winchester Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana on May 30, 1896 to Frank W. and Helen H. Hawks. His father was a wealthy paper manufacturer, and his younger brother William was involved in both banking and motion picture production. The screen-directing career of another brother, Kenneth, was cut short by a fatal plane crash in 1929, while filming aerial sequences for The Dawn Patrol. Hawks grew up in Pasadena, California, and he was educated at Pasadena High School, Philips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Cornell University, where he studied mechanical engineering. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty he drove racing cars professionally, and at eighteen he won the United States Junior Tennis Championship.Hawks never forgot his debt to Jesse Lasky, who gave him his entree to Hollywood. The future director began his apprenticeship in the movie craft as a prop boy for the Famous Players-Lasky (now Paramount) production of The Little Princess, starring Mary Pickford, in 1917. After service with the United States Army in World War I, as an air corpsman, Hawks returned to the Lasky studio, where he became a story writer and editor and, in 1922, scenario supervisor. Among the scripts on which he worked were those for Quicksands(1923), Tiger Love(1924), and The Dressmaker From Paris(1925). Beginning in 1922, Hawks also financed the directorial efforts of Marshall Neilan, Allan Dwan, Allen Holumbar, and others.In 1925, Hawks, who had on occasion assisted in directing at the Lasky studio, signed a term contract as director for the Fox Film Corporation (now Twentieth Century-Fox). "I finally got tired of other people directing and me writing, so I went to see a movie every night for six months," Hawks later reminisced. "And if I thought the movie was worth studying, I saw it twice that same night until I felt that I knew enough to direct. I learned right in the beginning from Jack Ford, and I learned what not to do by watching Cecil Demille." The first silent feature he directed was the not very popular The Road to Glory(1926), starring May McAvoy. From that initial failure, Hawks learned the secret of his latter success: avoid "annoying" audiences; "entertain" them. It was followed by the comedies Fig Leaves(1927), and The Cradle Snatchers(1927) and the tragicomedy Paid to Love(1927). Having been impressed with the photography in Murnau's Sunrise, he experimented with camera tricks--for the first and last time--in Paid to Love. "I hate screwed up camera angles. I like to tell it with a simple scene. I don't want you to be conscious that this is dramatic, because it throws it all off," he later said.In his book Howard Hawks (1968), Robin Wood points out that A Girl in Every Port(1928), starring Robert Armstrong and Victor McLaglen, "is the first example in Hawks's work of a love story between two men," a "relationship . . . arrested at a level of jolly fisticuffs." Another favorite theme of Hawks's was introduced in The Air Circus(1928), which began as a silent movie but ended with insertions of the newly invented audio. Hawks refused to have anything to do with the last-minute, arbitrary addition of sound and the direction was completed by Lewis B. Seiler. A third 1928 release directed by Hawks was Fazil, adapted from Pierre Frondaie's play L'Insoumie. Because Fox was unable to acquire the talking rights, Hawks's last production for the studio, the murder-mystery classic Trent's Last Case(1929), was anachronistically silent. After quitting Fox, Hawks never again committed himself to a term contract with a motion picture company.Hawks's first freelance project--and first talking picture--was the classic, unsentimental World War I air-squadron drama The Dawn Patrol(1930). The cast of Hawks's prison picture The Criminal Code(1931), included Boris Karloff and, typically, ex-convicts, who played extras and advised the director in his structuring of the plot. In 1932, Warner Brothers released Hawks's The Crowd Roars, an Indianapolis Speedway drama generally judged to be better than other early entries in the genre. Also in 1932, United Artists released Hawks's gangster masterpiece Scarface(actually made in 1930), based on the criminal career of Al Capone, in which Hawks introduced Paul Muni, George Raft and Ann Dvorak to the screen. Hawks also devised Raft's now famous laconical habit of flipping a coin while leaning against a door. Scarfaceestablished Hawks among cinemasts in Western Europe, especially France, where it became a perennial in cinema repertories. In the United States, the film was well received by both public and critics, but Howard Hughes, who co-produced it, withdrew it from revival circulation.After directing Tiger Shark(1932), which was the tale of a love triangle (Edward G. Robinson, Zita Johann, and Richard Arlen) among tuna fishermen, Hawks moved from Warners to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to star Joan Crawford in Today We Live(1933), his first and, in his opinion, least happy of many collaborations with William Faulkner. He began the direction of Viva Villa!(1934) at Metro, but when Louis B. Mayer tried to dictate casting to him, Hawks confronted Mayer angrily and bid him good-bye with a violent shove, vowing never to work for him again. (He never did.) The directorial assignment was completed by Jack Conway.It was Hawks who persuaded serious actress Carole Lombard to embark on her highly successful second career as a comedienne, in his fast-paced, transcontinental-Pullman-train comedy Twentieth Century(1934), scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Reviewers of the film were warm in their praise, especially for Hawks's use of overlapping dialogue, the one major indisputable technical innovation that the conservative genre director made in cinema.His San Francisco period drama Barbary Coast(1935) is not highly regarded by the director himself, but Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema(1968), observes the opening fog shots cast "a spell that is uniquely Hawksian" and exemplify Hawks's "uncanny technical flair for establishing. . .at the outset" a mood that is sustained to the end. The reviewer for the New York Herald Tribunejudged Hawks's Ceiling Zero(1935), about pioneer airmail pilots (James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, et. al.), to be "convincing and real." The director's 1936 Twentieth Century-Fox release The Road to Glory, not to be confused with his previous film of the same title, is an anti-war World War I trench-combat film. William Wyler took over the directing of Come and Get It (1936), based on Edna Ferber's novel, when, one short of completion, Hawks walked off the lot after disputing with producer Samuel Goldwyn over the film's ending. "He saw what I had shot, and it was a shock to him," said Hawks. "So Willie Wyler was put on and Wyler photographed six hundred feet of the film, and Goldwyn gave him credit for being co-director."Bringing Up Baby (1938), a wild comedy about the romantic entanglement of a zoology professor (Cary Grant) with a madcap heiress (Katherine Hepburn), is assessed by Robin Wood as "perhaps the funniest of Hawk's comedies but not the best." Wood writes of Hawks's second airmail drama, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), set in South America: "Hawks gives us a group sealed off from the outside world, forming a self-sufficient hermetic society with its own values. Outside, we are mainly aware of storms, darkness, and towering, seemingly impassable mountains: only in The Thing (From Another World) does Hawks again find a setting as ideal for the expression of his metaphysic."In remaking The Front Page with His Girl Friday (1940), Hawks transformed the glib Hildy Johnson into a woman reporter (Rosalind Russell) and came up with what R.A.E. Pickard in his Dictionary of 1,000 Best Films called "the last word in American wise-cracking comedies." Hawks was the original director of The Outlaw (1940), a western produced by Howard Hughes to showcase the physical assets of his discovery Jane Russell. Hughes dictated a $1.5 million budget for the film, while Hawks, who had always deplored Hollywood prodigality, insisted that film could be made for half the amount. Hughes discharged him and completed the directing himself. Because of the high threshold of censorship at the time, the distribution of Hughes's relatively tame (by 1978 standards) exercise in eroticism was delayed for three years, until 1943. In the opinion of George Fenin and William K. Everson, The Outlaw "would have been a very good Western but for the obtrusive eroticism."During Hollywood's golden age, Hawks owned a sixty-five-foot racing sloop, Sea Hawk, and a stable of thoroughbreds; fished with Ernest Hemingway; hunted with Gary Cooper; piloted small planes; led a motorcycle group that included Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck; and helped design the racing car that won the Indianapolis 500 in 1936.The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Hawks for a best-director Oscar only once, for Sergeant York (1941), the true story of Alvin York (Gary Cooper), a country-bumpkin religious pacifist who, as a World War I conscript, traduced his ideals and became a patriotic hero. Robin Wood points out that Sergeant York went against Hawks's grain, that this most "respectable" of Hawks's films was marred artistically by its explicit treatment of moral issues. "An intuitive artist," Wood observed, "he is ill-equipped to handle the big issues explicitly on any but a superficial level."Ball of Fire (1942), Hawks's comedy about the interaction of a stripteaser (Barbara Stanwyck) and eight bachelor professors (Gary Cooper among them) working on an encyclopedia is among the less distinguished of Hawks's comedies. Although Hawks himself dismisses Air Force (1943), the story of a World War II bomber crew, as merely a contribution to the war effort, Robin Wood considers it "in feeling perhaps the noblest of all his works. Another World War II movie, about naval action, was the relatively shallow Corvette K-225 (1943), produced by Hawks, directed by Richard Rosson, and introducing to the screen Hawks's discovery Ella Raines.Another Hawks find, Lauren Bacall, made her movie debut in To Have and Have Not (1944), which critics did not fully appreciate (because of ambivalence of its hero, played by Humphrey Bogart, toward war-time partisanship) until World War II was over. Hawks, who did not like to work with women stars because "it's too damn hard to make them play the kind of girl . . . you can treat as a man," found in Miss Bacall "my type of actress--slow, sardonic, insolent, leaning against something and sizing you up."Bogart and Bacall were teamed for a second time in The Big Sleep (1946), an oblique, convoluted adaptation (by Hawks and William Faulkner) of Raymond Chandler's amoral private detective novel. It is still popular with many cinema enthusiasts at film retrospectives and on late-night television.Hawks produced as well as directed Red River (1948), the western about cattle-driving on the Chisholm Trail that introduced Joanne Dru and started John Wayne on his new, current career as an older-role actor. Hawks said that, "When Ford saw Red River, he said, 'I never knew that big fellow could act.' And he put him in about three pictures in the next two years--made a big star out of him. . . whenever I made a picture with Wayne, he would come down and stay a week on location." Joel Greenberg and Charles Higham credit the cowboy classic with "a rhythm, scope, and grandeur that many Westerns aim at but few realize."A Song is Born (1948), a dismal remake of Ball of Fire, with Danny Kaye as the male lead, was one of the few Hawks films to make no profit. R.A.E. Pickard rates I Was a Male War Bride (1949)--in which Cary Grant as Henri Rochard dons "drag" in order to be near Ann Sheridan, as his WAC spouse--below Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, "but still better than most" comedies. Director Christian Nyby's science-fiction film The Thing (From Another World) (1951)--which had James Arness in his first featured role, as the "intellectual carrot" that arrives at the North Pole by flying saucer--was produced by Hawks, who also lent heavy directorial assistance to Nyby.The comradery of rugged men in producer-director Hawks's superior western The Big Sky (1952), an adaptation of A. B. Guthrie's novel, is reminiscent of that in A Girl in Every Port. After directing The Ransom of Red Chief episode in the omnibus O. Henry's Full House (1952), Hawks undertook Monkey Business (1952), about an absent-minded professor (Cary Grant) who develops a rejuvenating chemical. Some critics found it perhaps just a little too "screwball," but Robin Wood ranks it as "Hawks's greatest comedy."Hawks enjoyed making the slick hit musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). He found it ironic that the audience found the film's stars (Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell) sexy when the picture was a "complete caricature, a travesty on sex." The Land of the Pharaohs (1955) a Cinemascope extravaganza directed and co-produced by Hawks, was perhaps his worst failure, both commercially and artistically.After several years of leisurely sojourn in Europe, Hawks returned to his craft as producer and director of Rio Bravo (1959), starring John Wayne as a sheriff and Dean Martin as his alcoholic deputy. Hawks was moved to make it out of reaction against Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952). With Wayne again starring, Hawks filmed Hatari! (1962) in East Africa's big game country. Critics found it "exciting," "humorous," and "dazzling" in its hefty improvisational techniques, and Hawks, who produced as well as directed it (as he did all of his subsequent works), personally made a reported $2,500,000 on the film.Man's Favorite Sport? (1963), a fishing farce starring Rock Hudson, is probably the least funny of Hawks's comedies. Critics generally panned Red Line 7000 (1965), but Robin Wood called it "the most underestimated film of the sixties. . . an intensely personal film" about stock car racing.As Andrew Sarris has observed, Hawks "dared to repeat himself shamelessly" from Rio Bravo in El Dorado (1966), a Wayne western co-starring Robert Mitchum. Hawks was again criticized for self-borrowing in the Wayne picture Rio Lobo (1970), which grossed over $4,250,000 in the United States alone. Hawks has said as quoted in the Washington Post: "I told him (Wayne) twenty years ago to do three scenes in a picture and not annoy the audience in the rest of the picture and you'll stay as a star." Hawks believed that audiences remember scenes, not plots. He disliked the intense drawn-out violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and leaned more towards the quick action and general style of John Ford. "I copied him every time I could," Hawks said of Ford in 1970. "One of my favorite pictures of all time is The Quiet Man, which I think was just a beautiful picture. Every time I run into a scene that I think Ford does very well, I stop and think, 'What would he have done here?' And then I go ahead and do it."Howard Hawks was six feet one inch tall and had a quiet voice, a suave manner, a restless, earnest temperament, and a generally conservative outlook. According to a writer for Newsweek (February 8, 1971), the "bluff diffidence" with which he speaks of his pictures "masks an artist's pride." The Newsweek writer observed that Hawks was still talking about the three-month retrospective of his work held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962. London's National Film Theatre held a retrospective of twenty-seven of his feature films in the same year, and in April 1970, at the Vienna Film Festival, thirty-one of his features were screened. And, in 1975 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave hawks an Honorary Award as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures taken as a whole represent one of the most consistent, vivid and varied bodies of work in world cinema."Hawks was married to Athole Shearer from 1928 to 1940, and by her he had a son, David, and a daughter, Barbara. By Nancy Raye Gross, to whom he was married from 1941 to 1945, he had a second daughter, Kitty. From 1953 to 1959, he was married to Dee Hartford and had a son, Gregg. Hawks also adopted a son, Peter. All of the marriages ended in divorce. Hawks died December 26, 1977 from complications arising from a fall weeks earlier at his Palm Springs home. The Howard Hawks Collection constitutes a valuable primary source for all aspects of motion picture production in the United States. It contains photographs, scripts (many unproduced), contracts, correspondence, scenarios, research on many of Hawks's greatest motion pictures and family and business records, all of which are arranged under five main headings, viz. PERSONAL, BUSINESS, MOTION PICTURES, PHOTOGRAPHS, TEST SCENES. The motion picture material is arranged alphabetically by film title. A given film, for example, will have pertinent correspondence, scripts, newspaper clippings, etc. available on that film together as a unit rather than filed separately by type of record. Films which were produced and/or directed by Hawks himself are identified by an asterisk (*) next to the film title. A complete list of his films is located at the end of the Container List.Covering the years 1925 through 1970, the strength of the collection is in the number of scripts, both those that Hawks directed himself and those on which he collaborated in the story treatment or dialogue. For example, a script from the early Josef von Sternberg classic Shanghai Expressand from Moroccoare in the collection with annotations by Hawks, who contributed on the story and dialogue. Also included are a half-dozen unproduced scripts by famed American novelist William Faulkner, whose start in screenwriting was precipitated by Hawks.All scripts--produced and unproduced--are arranged under the heading MOTION PICTURES. Where scripts were neither directed nor written by Hawks himself, attempts have been made to indicate where or note the script was made into a complete film. Either a (+) for unproduced scripts or the year the director in parenthesis indicating a completed film, will follow titles of the film's not directed by Hawks. While every attempt has been made to insure the accuracy of such designations, particularly where scripts are concerned, the researcher should be aware that a script which is eventually produced into a film can, in its embryonic stages, undergo a host of alternate or working titles as well as story modifications. Thus, such information as is printed herein is subject to change pending availability of additional documentation.In addition to the nearly 20 unproduced scripts, there are a number of test scenes or excerpts of scripts used in testing new talent. They come from films such as The Grapes of Wrath, Viva Villa, The Outlaw, Dinner at Eight, and I was a Male War Bride, and are arranged as a group under MOTION PICTURES except when the full script to the film is also present in the collection. Then, the test scene is filed under the motion picture title to which it relates.Films such as Red River, The Big Sleep, and To Have and Have Not, are documented with correspondence, story treatments, scripts (more than one version in most cases), research, censorship files and photographs. Production files, available on some titles, usually consist of cast lists, call sheets, budgetary information and other technical data incident to the production of the film. However, the amount of production material varies greatly from film to film. Those films most completely documented are The Battle Cry, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sky, The Big Sleep, The Black Door, A Girl in Every Port, Hatari!, The Left Hand of God, and Red River. Correspondence, other than that oriented to a particular film, is limited to a few letters from movie aspirants in search of a job, routine business, personal and household correspondence. Such correspondence, however, does include information on a number of significant topics and letters from significant correspondents. Topics include: the acquisition of paintings from a friend in Mexico, horses and motorcycles, personal "thank yous" for kindnesses extended to friends, financial, tax agreements fixing a period of limitation on wartime earnings and stock reports for the Empire Trust Company (1944). Correspondents include: David Smart (then editor of Esquire) about Fred Smith (an artist with the magazine), Dan Topping of the New York Yankees, Alan Miller of the Zeppo Marx talent agency, Christian Nyby, who was a long time film editor with Hawks and directed The Thing, and Margaret Sheridan, a Hawks talent discovery, who starred in that film.The large collection of over 450 photographs in the Hawks Collection includes publicity and/or production stills for Red River, To Have and Have Not, Hatari!, Land of the Pharaohs, Sergeant York, Gentlemen Prefer Blondesand others. While they are indexed in this register with the papers, they are preserved in the Photo Archives. The collection is arranged into five main series: PERSONAL, BUSINESS, MOTION PICTURES, PHOTOGRAPHS, TEST SCENES. The motion picture material is arranged alphabetically by film title. A given film, for example, will have pertinent correspondence, scripts, newspaper clippings, etc. available on that film together as a unit rather than filed separately by type of record. Films which were produced and/or directed by Hawks himself are identified by an asterisk (*) next to the film title. A complete list of his films is located at the end of the Container List.
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