William A. Wellman

Birthday: Feb 29, 1896
Birthplace: Brookline, Massachusetts

Bio: William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his "larger-than-life" personality and lifestyle. A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the the 29th of February to a stockbroker father in Brookline,… More Bio: William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his "larger-than-life" personality and lifestyle. A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the the 29th of February to a stockbroker father in Brookline, Massachusetts, Wellman was the great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. His mother, the former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland.Despite an upper-middle class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also enjoyed joy-riding in stolen cars at nights.Cecilia Wellman served as a probation officer for "wayward boys" (juvenile delinquents) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and was such a success in her field, she was asked to address Congress on the subject of delinquency. One of her charges was her own son, as the young Bill Wellman was kicked out school at the age of 17 for hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He tried making a living as a candy and a cotton salesman, but failed. He then worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control of a truck and driving it through the side of the barn. Eventually, he wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts and, as a young actor, playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston named Douglas Fairbanks noticed Wellman while attending the games.Impressed by his good looks and the figure he cut on ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar Fairbanks suggested to Wellman that he had what it took to become a movie actor. But Wellman's youthful dream was to become an aviator, but since his father "didn't have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way...I went into a war to become a flier."When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle, Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he learned to fly. In France, Wellman served as a pilot with the famous Lafayette Flying Corps (Lafayette Escadrille), where he won his nickname "Wild Bill" due to his "devil-may-care" style in the air. He and fellow pilot Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player, were in the "Black Cat" group. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft and injured during the landing of his plane, which had lost its tail section. Out of 222 Escadrille pilots, 87 were killed, but Wellman was fated to serve out the duration with the French. In the spring of 1918, Wellman was recruited by the U.S. Army Air Corps, joining "because I was broke, and they were trying to get us in." Commissioned an officer, he was sent back to the states and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego, California, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.During the weekends, Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Douglas Fairbanks' polo fields to spend the weekend with him. Fairbanks said that he would help the returning hero break into the movies when the war was over, and he was as good as his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast him as the juvenile in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) and as a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but acting was something Wellman grew to hate (a hatred he later transferred to actors). He was fired by fellow he-man director Raoul Walsh from Evangeline (1919) for slapping the lead actress, who Wellman didn't know was Walsh's wife. Disgusted with acting, Wellman told Faribanks he wanted to be a director, and Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business. It was a "purely financial" decision, he later recalled, as the director made more money than did supporting actors at the time.Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920, and he soon made his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an assistant property man, then as a property man, assistant director and second unit director, before making his uncredited directorial debut later that year at Fox with The Twins of Suffering Creek (1920) (starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman's star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after). Wellman later remembered the film as awful, along with such other B-Westerns as _Cupid's Fireman (1923)_ starring Buck Jones, whose Westerns he began directing in 1923 after serving his apprenticeship.Fox Studio gave him his first directing credit in 1923 with the Buck Jones hoss opera Second Hand Love (1923), and other than one more Dustin Farnum picture The Man Who Won (1923), he turned out Jones pictures for the rest of his time at Fox. The studio fired him in 1924 after he asked for a raise upon completing The Circus Cowboy (1924), another Buck Jones oater. He moved to Columbia to helm When Husbands Flirt (1925), then over to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the slapstick comedy The Boob (1926) before landing at Famous Players-Lasky (now known as Paramount Pictures after its distribution unit) where he directed You Never Know Women (1926) and The Cat's Pajamas (1926). It was as a contract director at the now renamed Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. that he had his breakthrough, due to his flying background. Paramount entrusted its epic World War One flying epic Wings (1927) to Wellman, the film that went on to become what is now recognized as the first Academy Award-wining Best Picture, Wings (1927).Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct Wings (1927) (he also appeared one time as a stunt-pilot, flying one of the German planes that landed and rolled over). The production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65 pilots, and 165 airplanes. The massive production went over budget and over schedule due to Wellman's perfectionism, and he came close to being fired more than once. It took a year to film Wings (1927), but when it was released, it turned out to be one of the most financially successful silent pictures ever released and helped put Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. Wings (1927) and Wellman's next flying picture, _Legion of the Condemned, The (1928)_ (which starred 'Gary Cooper'), initiated the genre of World War One aviation movie, which included such famous works as 'Howard Hughes'' Hell's Angels (1930) and Howard Hawks's The Dawn Patrol (1930). Despite his success in bringing in the first "Best Picture" Oscar winner, Paramount did not keep Wellman under contract.Wellman's disdain for actors already was flourishing by the time he wrapped Wings (1927). Many actors appearing in his pictures intensely disliked Wellman's method of bullying them to elicit a performance.Wellman was a macho man's man who hated male actors due to their narcissism, yet preferred to work with them because he despised the preparation that actresses had to go through with their make-up and hairdressing before each scene. Wellman shot his films fast. The hard-drinking Wellman usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his own life-style. He married five women, including a Zeigfeld Follies showgirl, before settling down with Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed that his Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself.She appeared in as a tomboy in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a Depression Era social commentary picture made for the progressive Warner Bros. The film is a favorite of Martin Scorsese. It came two years after Wellman's masterpiece of the era, The Public Enemy (1931), one of the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures, and the film that made James Cagney a superstar. Scorsese says that Wellman's use of music in the film influenced his own first "gangster" picture, Mean Streets (1973).Wellman was equally adept at comedy as he was with macho material, helming the original A Star Is Born (1937) (for which won his only Oscar, for Best Original Story) and the biting satire Nothing Sacred (1937) -- both of which starred Fredric March -- for producer David O. Selznick. Both movies were dissections of the fame game, as was his satire Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films.During the World War Two Era, Wellman continued to make outstanding films, including The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and G.I. Joe: The Ernie Pyle Story (1998) (TV), as well as Battleground (1949) after the war. In the 1950s, Wellman's best films starred John Wayne, including the influential aviation picture The High and the Mighty (1954), for which he received his third and last Best Director Oscar nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service, Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner Bros.'s post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.Other than David O. Selznick, the hell-raising iconoclast Wellman was not well-liked. Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, the first wife of David O. Selznick, said that Wellman was "a terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-don't-know-what."The first Mrs. Selznick didn't like Wellman. And although the Directors Guild of America in 1973 honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, he has been ignored by cineastes since his death in 1975 from leukemia, despite the many masterpieces of his oeuvre which put to shame many of the rediscovered "masters" of film.