George Stevens, Jr.
speaker
49 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
George Stevens, Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I went with my father to the 1952 Academy Awards in Hollywood. A Place in the Sun had just been released. And we sat next to one another at the Pantages Theater. And Joseph Mankiewicz, a great director, had won the Oscar the year before for the Lady Eve, I believe. And he came out and read the nominations. And it was John Huston for The African Queen, William Wyler for Detective Story,
Vincent Minnelli for An American in Paris, Elia Kazan for A Streetcar Named Desire, and George Stevens for A Place in the Sun. Quite a lineup. Heck yeah. And A Place in the Sun won. But riding home that night, the Oscar was on the seat between us in the car. I think I was about 18 years old.
And my father looked over at me and he said, you know, this is before DVDs and streaming pictures came and went. And he said, we'll have a better idea what kind of a film this is in about 25 years. He understood that with art, what's important is what lasts. And when you talk about legacy,
You know, the idea that you've not made a picture that's going to be forgotten, that you make one and you mentioned several that are being shown 70 years after he made them. So that is part of our family legacy.
Well, you know, it's interesting. My life took a turn. I was pleased with the work I was doing on Alfred Hitchcock and working with him on the Diary of Anne Frank. But then I went to Washington, Edward R. Murrow, the great war correspondent, went to work for President Kennedy, the United States Information Agency, and he invited me to go to Washington.
And it was a huge decision to leave what I was doing in Hollywood and go off on this other tangent. But being with with President Kennedy and Murrow in the New Frontier, and we made documentary films. And there I really got a sense of my own work, that it was independent of my father, and it was highly regarded. And, you know, I went on to start the American Film Institute.
And so pretty soon I got comfortable with my own place in the creative world.
Yes. I made a film called The Five Cities of June with a director called Bruce Hershenson, which told the story of President Kennedy going to Berlin in 1963 and standing before the Berlin Wall and making his famous Ich bin ein Berliner. I am a Berliner speech before Berlin. 400,000 people at the Berlin Wall. It was a very dramatic movie, and we showed it, of course, overseas.
And one afternoon, I was in Edward R. Murrow's director's meeting with about 25 people and my assistant, my deputy. came in and handed me a note. And I read it, and I kind of looked at Murrow, and I got up and left the meeting and went down one flight to my office. And my assistant said, Mrs. Lincoln's on the line. She said, I'll ask her to put the president on.
And it was President Kennedy calling me. And he came on the phone and he said, George, he said, I saw the five cities of June last night. He said, it's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. He said, how many countries is it being shown in? How many languages? He asked all of these Kennedy questions. And he was known that President Kennedy often wouldn't call the Secretary of State.
He'd call somebody on the Cambodia desk to ask questions because he wanted to get firsthand knowledge. So he had called me to find out about this movie. He was that kind of leader, an inspiring figure.
Legacy is just so much a part of my life. You know, my memoir, My Place in the Sun, Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood in Washington, I wrote it and it really became all about legacy because my father was one of the great movie directors who left when I was 11 for three years to go to World War II in Europe. He was a
And as I wrote my memoir, you know, I look back and I realize that our family really is about legacy. My great-grandmother, Georgia Woodthorpe, was an actress in San Francisco around the time of the Civil War. And she went on to become a star. And Edwin Booth was the greatest Hamlet, America's greatest Hamlet, the Booth Theater in New York. Nope. after him.
And Georgia Woodthorpe was the youngest Ophelia to Edwin Booth's Hamlet. And Georgia started five generations of Stevens's in show business. Her daughter, Georgie Cooper, became an actress. and married an actor named Lander Stevens, and my father was their child, and he grew up around the theater.
His mother gave him a box brownie camera when he was nine years old, and led him to become one of the greatest movie directors of all time, and he also photographed World War II. with a team of cameramen. And my mother's mother, Alice Howell, was a silent film star. She was in Charlie Chaplin's first five pictures. Then she went on to make a hundred movies of her own.
So I've always been conscious, and particularly since writing the memoir, of what legacy means to a family, that you preserve the memory of of that family. You know, my father's films, movies have a way of getting lost and disappearing. And I've nurtured the preservation of his films.
A great deal. There are a lot of stories of Hollywood sons who have difficult lives, and there can be different reasons for that. And my father was a wonderful man and You know, we became great friends. I worked with him. Again, it comes to legacy. I went with my father to the 1952 Academy Awards in Hollywood, a place in the sun had just been released.
And we sat next to one another at the Pantages Theater. And Joseph Mankiewicz, a great director, had won the Oscar the year before for the Lady Eve, I believe. And he came out and read the nominations.
And it was John Huston for The African Queen, William Wyler for Detective Story, Vincent Minnelli for An American in Paris, Elia Kazan for A Streetcar Named Desire, and George Stevens for A Place in the Sun. Quite a lineup. Heck yeah. And A Place in the Sun won. But riding home that night, the Oscar was on the seat between us in the car. I think I was about 18 years old.
And my father looked over at me and he said, you know, this is before DVDs and streaming pictures came and went. And he said, we'll have a better idea what kind of a film this is in about 25 years. He understood that with art, what's important is what lasts. And when you talk about legacy,
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