Gregory La Cava

Gregory La Cava (March 10, 1892 – March 1, 1952) was an American film director of Italian descent best known for his films of the 1930s, including My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, which earned him nominations for Academy Award for Best Director.

Career

La Cava was born in Towanda, Pennsylvania.<ref name="nytobit" /> His father was a shoemaker, and the family moved to Rochester, New York. La Cava reported for the Rochester Evening News and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a member of the Art Students' League.<ref name=ci>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Animator

Around 1913, he started doing odd jobs at the Barré Studio. By 1915, he was an animator on the Animated Grouch Chasers series.

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Policy and Pie part 1 of 2 (1918)

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Policy and Pie part 2 of 2 (1918)

Towards the end of 1915, William Randolph Hearst decided to create an animation studio to promote the comic strips printed in his newspapers. He called the new company International Film Service, and he hired La Cava to run it (for double what he was making with Barré). La Cava's first employee was his co-worker at the Barré Studio, Frank Moser. Another was his fellow student in Chicago, Grim Natwick (later to achieve fame at Disney). As he developed more and more of Hearst's comics into cartoon series, he came to put semi-independent units in charge of each, leading to the growth of individual styles.

La Cava also had the significant advantage over other studios of an unlimited budget: Hearst's business sense completely broke down when it came to his Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial and the "living comic strips" they contained. La Cava's main fault as a producer and director was that his cartoons were too clearly animated comic strips, hampered by speech balloons when rival Bray Studio was creating more effective series with original characters. He was apparently aware of this fault, and he had his animators study Charlie Chaplin films to improve their timing and characterization. But he didn't have time to achieve very much, because in July 1918, Hearst's bankers caught up with him and International Film Service was shut down.

Hearst still wanted his characters animated, so he licensed various studios to continue the IFS series. La Cava and most of the IFS staff got jobs with John Terry's studio (not surprising since John Terry himself was an IFS alumnus). This only lasted a few months before Terry's studio went out of business. The animators were immediately hired by Goldwyn-Bray (as Bray Productions was now known), but La Cava was not, since Goldwyn-Bray had several producers of its own and La Cava was not interested in starting over. Instead, he moved west to Hollywood.

Live action reels and features

By 1922, La Cava had become a live-action director of two-reel comedies, the direct competitor to animated films. Among the actors he directed in the silent era are:

• Bebe Daniels (Feel My Pulse, 1928)
• Richard Dix
• W. C. Fields (So's Your Old Man, 1926 and Running Wild, 1927) He became a good friend and drinking companion of Fields.

La Cava worked his way up to feature films in the silent era, but it is for his work in sound films of the 1930s—especially comedies—that he is best known today. And though he did not always get credit, he also often had a hand in creating the screenplays for his films. Among the sound films he directed are:

• Laugh and Get Rich (1931) with Edna May Oliver and Hugh Herbert

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Helen Hayes in La Cava's film What Every Woman Knows (1934)

• The Half-Naked Truth (1932) with Lupe Vélez and Lee Tracy
• The Age of Consent (1932) for RKO, starring Richard Cromwell, Eric Linden, and Dorothy Wilson.
• Symphony of Six Million (1932) for RKO, based on a story by Fannie Hurst and starring Ricardo Cortez and Irene Dunne, which featured one of the first symphonic scores of the talkie era by Max Steiner.
• Bed of Roses (1932) with Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton
• Gabriel Over the White House (1933) with Walter Huston
• What Every Woman Knows (1934) with Helen Hayes
• The Affairs of Cellini (1934) with Constance Bennett and Fredric March
• Private Worlds (1935) with Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer and Joel McCrea
• She Married Her Boss (1935) with Claudette Colbert and Melvyn Douglas
• My Man Godfrey (1936, nominated for the Best Director Academy Award) with William Powell and Carole Lombard
• Stage Door (1937, also nominated for Best Director) with Katharine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou, and Gail Patrick, as well as his first of three consecutive films with Ginger Rogers
• Fifth Avenue Girl (1939) with Ginger Rogers and Walter Connolly
• Primrose Path (1940) with Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea

During the 1940s, his career floundered<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> when his output dropped severely. He only officially directed one film after 1942, Living in a Big Way (1947).

Appraisal

Writer Allan Scott said that La Cava was heavily influenced by the Depression - "he talked about it all the time."<ref>McGillian p 326</ref> Scott later recalled:

Greg was an artist, but his chief weakness was booze. There was a legend that he never had a script when he began shooting a picture. This was, of course, untrue. We had many conferences, and I would write sometimes as many as four and five different versions of each scene. But because of his mistrust of the front office and his theory of acting, there was never a script shown to anyone but only an outline given to the various departments. His idea was that if the actors had a script, they’d get stale. Literally, on the day of the shooting we’d stay in our trailer with his secretary of many years, with all the versions I had written, and with the notes he had made strewn around, and he would dictate what he liked of my scenes, annotating them as he liked. Then the secretary would type up the necessary copies, the actors would get the script, and within the hour we were shooting. This way, he believed, and actually he got, a kind of spontaneity that was sometimes lacking—because we didn’t rehearse enough in those days. <ref>McGilligan p 327</ref>

Personal life and death

La Cava and his first wife, Beryl, had a son. They were divorced in 1937.<ref name="nytobit" /> On December 2, 1940, La Cava married Mrs. Grace O. Garland, widow of William J. Garland.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He died on March 1, 1952, in his sleep in his home, nine days shy of his 60th birthday.<ref name="nytobit">Template:Cite news</ref> His remains were buried at Chapel of the Pines Crematory.Template:Citation needed

Filmography

Year	Film	Academy Award Nominations	Academy Award Wins
1921	His Nibs
1923	The Life of Reilly
	Beware of the Dog
1924	Restless Wives
	The New School Teacher
1925	Womanhandled
1926	Let's Get Married
	Say It Again
	So's Your Old Man
1927	Paradise for Two
	Running Wild
	Tell It to Sweeney
	The Gay Defender
1928	Half a Bride
	Feel My Pulse
1929	Saturday's Children
	Big News
	His First Command
1931	Laugh and Get Rich
	Smart Woman
1932	Symphony of Six Million
	The Age of Consent
	The Half-Naked Truth
1933	Gabriel Over the White House
	Bed of Roses
	Gallant Lady
1934	The Affairs of Cellini	4	0
	What Every Woman Knows
1935	Private Worlds	1	0
	She Married Her Boss
1936	My Man Godfrey	6	0
1937	Stage Door	4	0
1939	Fifth Avenue Girl
1940	Primrose Path	1	0
1941	Unfinished Business
1942	Lady in a Jam
1947	Living in a Big Way
1948	One Touch of Venus

Notes

• George Carpetto, "Gregory La Cava," in Italian Americans of the Twentieth Century, ed. George Carpetto (Tampa, FL: Loggia Press, 1999), pp. 196–197.
• Joe Adamson; The Walter Lantz Story; G. P. Putnam's Sons; Template:ISBN (1985)
• Donald Crafton; Before Mickey: The Animated Film: 1898–1928; The University of Chicago Press; Template:ISBN (1982, 1993)
• Leonard Maltin; Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons; Penguin Books; Template:ISBN (1980, 1987)
• Template:Cite book

External links

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