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
The idea that you've not made a picture that's going to be forgotten, that you make one and you mention several that are being shown 70 years after he made them. So that is part of our family legacy.
You know, I was interested in being a sports writer. You know, in school, I edited the paper and did all of that stuff. But it's unlikely that I would have been attracted to film or have had that sense. Definitely it was because I was around my father. And I have to recall, you know, because when I was young, I worked with them on Shane and then Giant.
And then I went in the Air Force for two years and came back. And then I started working with Jack Webb, who made Dragnet, a terrific actor, producer. And he gave me a chance to start directing television. And I was directing Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Peter Gunn and things like that, and then went to work with my father on the Diary of Anne Frank.
But I do admit my father was so talented and so in command of what he was doing and so respected that I really kind of in the back of my mind worried about whether I really would ever be able to live up to that quality of work.
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. 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. What was that like getting into politics and putting that on film? Well, it was just great. And, you know, the Kennedy years were just so exciting, the short time they lasted. And President Kennedy was an inspiration. Wonderful quotes he would make. And I wrote down one.
He loved the ancient Greek poets, and he had one that was the Greek definition of happiness, full use of one's powers along lines of excellence. And I wrote that down, and here I was making these films under Edward R. Murrow, aspiring to make them famous. really excellent. And I realized I was living with President Kennedy, the Greek definition of happiness as a 29-year-old young man.
So Kennedy, he, and then also Bobby, they had a great influence on me in terms of kind of my aspirations and values and ideals.
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 directors 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 first-hand knowledge so he had called me to find out about this movie He was that kind of leader and inspiring figure.
Well, when we started AFI, that was one of the reasons for starting it. We started a rescue program because half of the films that was in 1967 and half of the films that had made from 1900 till then were missing and they were made on nitrate film. so they could just decompose in their cans.
And we started a rescue program and saved, there are 42,000 feature films in the Library of Congress in the American Film Institute collection, which were films that AFI saved and are preserved for generations today. So that was one of our big jobs. And we also started a conservatory which exists today. It's over 50 years old, which is really training the best filmmakers in America.
Terrence Malick and David Lynch from those old days and Patty Jenkins and other wonderful contemporary filmmakers are all graduates of AFI.
Yeah, well, again, I was inspired by President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, who both have had real understanding of the problems of race in America. And we made films at USIA. One won the Academy Award called Nine from Little Rock. which was the story of the nine students who entered Little Rock High School. They were the first black students. And we tell the story of their lives.
And much later, I wanted to tell the story of the cases that ended school desegregation. The unanimous Supreme Court decision led by the great Justice Earl Warren that outlawed segregated schools. In 1890, Plessy versus Ferguson ruled the Supreme Court that segregated schools were equal, segregated facilities were legal if they were equal.
And of course, in the South, they were anything but equal, separate restrooms, separate schools. And Thurgood Marshall, as a young lawyer, took on this case to go to the Supreme Court and prove that separate but equal should not be the law of the land when it led to that unanimous Supreme Court decision. So we made separate but equal miniseries that won the Emmy for the best miniseries in 1991.
And Sidney Poitier plays Thurgood Marshall and Burt Lancaster plays the other lawyer in the Supreme Court arguments. and a wonderful cast of actors, Cleavon Little and Albert Hall and Richard Kiley as Earl Warren. But for people to have the opportunity to understand the drama of what it took to end this unfortunate law, watching Separate but Equal can be a real treat.
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