Gregory La Cava
Gregory La Cava 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. 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.Animator
Around 1913, he started doing odd jobs at the Barré Studio. By 1915, he was an animator on the Animated Grouch Chasers series.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. La Cava's first employee was his co-worker at the Barré Studio, Frank Moser. Another was his fellow student in Chicago, Grim Natwick. 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. This only lasted a few months before Terry's studio went out of business. The animators were immediately hired by Goldwyn-Bray, 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
- Richard Dix
- W. C. Fields He became a good friend and drinking companion of Fields.
- Laugh and Get Rich with Edna May Oliver and Hugh Herbert
- The Half-Naked Truth with Lupe Vélez and Lee Tracy
- The [Age of Consent |The Age of Consent] for RKO, starring Richard Cromwell, Eric Linden, and Dorothy Wilson.
- Symphony of Six Million 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 with Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton
- Gabriel Over the White House with Walter Huston
- What Every Woman Knows with Helen Hayes
- The Affairs of Cellini with Constance Bennett and Fredric March
- Private Worlds with Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer and Joel McCrea
- She Married Her Boss with Claudette Colbert and Melvyn Douglas
- My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard
- Stage Door with Katharine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou, and Gail Patrick, as well as his first of three consecutive films with Ginger Rogers
- Fifth Avenue Girl with Ginger Rogers and Walter Connolly
- Primrose Path with Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea
Appraisal
Writer Allan Scott said that La Cava was heavily influenced by the Depression - "he talked about it all the time." 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.
Personal life and death
La Cava and his first wife, Beryl, had a son. They were divorced in 1937. On December 2, 1940, La Cava married Mrs. Grace O. Garland, widow of William J. Garland. He died on March 1, 1952, in his sleep in his home, nine days shy of his 60th birthday. His remains were buried at Chapel of the Pines Crematory.Filmography
| Year | Film | Academy Award Nominations | Academy Award Wins |
| 1921 | His Nibs | ||
| 1923 | The [Life of Reilly |The Life of Reilly] | ||
| 1923 | Beware of the Dog | ||
| 1924 | Restless Wives | ||
| 1924 | The New School Teacher | ||
| 1925 | Womanhandled | ||
| 1926 | Let's Get Married | ||
| 1926 | Say It Again | ||
| 1926 | So's Your Old Man | ||
| 1927 | Paradise for Two | ||
| 1927 | Running Wild | ||
| 1927 | Tell It to Sweeney | ||
| 1927 | The Gay Defender | ||
| 1928 | Half a Bride | ||
| 1928 | Feel My Pulse | ||
| 1929 | Saturday's Children | ||
| 1929 | Big News | ||
| 1929 | His First Command | ||
| 1931 | Laugh and Get Rich | ||
| 1931 | Smart Woman | ||
| 1932 | Symphony of Six Million | ||
| 1932 | The Age of Consent | ||
| 1932 | The Half-Naked Truth | ||
| 1933 | Gabriel Over the White House | ||
| 1933 | Bed of Roses | ||
| 1933 | Gallant Lady | ||
| 1934 | The Affairs of Cellini | 4 | 0 |
| 1934 | What Every Woman Knows | ||
| 1935 | Private Worlds | 1 | 0 |
| 1935 | 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 |