William A. Wellman - Film Career

Film Career

While in San Diego, Wellman would fly to Hollywood for the weekends in his Spad fighter, using Fairbanks' polo field in Bel Air as a landing strip. Fairbanks was fascinated with the true-life adventures of "Wild Bill" and promised to recommend him for a job in the movie business; he was responsible for Wellman being cast in the juvenile lead of The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919). Wellman was hired for the role of a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but was fired for slapping the leading lady, the actress Miriam Cooper, who happened to be the wife of director Raoul Walsh.

It did not matter, because Wellman hated being an actor, thought it was unmasculine, and disliked how he looked on film. He soon switched to working behind the camera, aiming to be a director, and progressed up the line as "a messenger boy, as an assistant cutter, an assistant property man, a property man, an assistant director, second unit director and eventually... director." His first assignment as an assistant director for Bernie Durning provided him with a work ethic that he adopted for future film work. One strict rule that Durning enforced was no fraternization with screen femme fatales, which almost immediately Wellman broke, leading to a confrontation and a thrashing from the director. Despite his transgression, both men became lifelong friends, and Wellman steadily progressed to more difficult first unit assignments.

Wellman made his uncredited directorial debut in 1920 at Fox with The Twins of Suffering Creek. The first films he was credited with directing were The Man Who Won and Second Hand Love, released on the same day in 1923. After directing a dozen low-budget 'horse opera' films (some of which he would rather forget), Wellman was hired by Paramount in 1927 to direct Wings, a major war drama dealing with fighter pilots during World War I that was highlighted by air combat and flight sequences. The film culminates with the epic Battle of Saint-Mihiel. In the 1st Academy Awards it was one of two films to win Best Picture (the other was Sunrise).

Wellman's other notable films include The Public Enemy (1931), the first version of A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), the 1939 version of Beau Geste starring Gary Cooper, Thunder Birds (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Lady of Burlesque (1943), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Battleground (1949) and two films starring and co-produced by John Wayne, Island in the Sky (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954).

While he was primarily a director, Wellman also produced ten films, one of them uncredited, all of which he also directed. His last film was Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which he produced, directed, wrote the story for and narrated. He wrote the screenplay for two other films that he directed, and one film that he did not direct, 1936's The Last Gangster. He also wrote the story for A Star Is Born and received a story credit for both remakes in 1954 and 1976.

Wellman was known for his disdain for actors in general, and actresses in particular, "Movie stardom isn't about acting ability - it's personality and temperament", he stated in 1952, and added, "I once directed Clara Bow. She was mad and crazy but WHAT a personality!"

Many actors disliked working with him, because he bullied them to get the performance he wanted. Wellman liked to work fast. Even though he hated their narcissism, he preferred working with men, because they did not need as much preparation time before shooting as women did. Despite all this, Wellman managed to elicit Oscar-nominated performances from seven different actors: Fredric March and Janet Gaynor (A Star Is Born), Brian Donlevy (Beau Geste), Robert Mitchum (The Story of G.I. Joe), James Whitmore (Battleground), and Jan Sterling and Claire Trevor (The High and Mighty).

In his career, Wellman won a single Academy Award, for the story of A Star Is Born. He was nominated as best director three times, for A Star Is Born, Battleground and The High and Mighty, for which he was also nominated by the Directors Guild of America as best director. In 1973, the DGA honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Wellman also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6125 Hollywood Blvd.

Several filmmakers have examined Wellman's career. Richard Schickel devoted an episode of his PBS series The Men Who Made the Movies to Wellman in 1973, and in 1996, Todd Robinson made the feature-length documentary Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick.