Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. The critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name." Roger Ebert called Hawks "one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material." He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York and earned the Honorary Academy Award in 1974.
A versatile director, Hawks explored many genres such as comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, war films and Westerns. His most popular films include Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River, The Thing from Another World, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Rio Bravo. His frequent portrayals of strong, tough-talking female characters came to define the "Hawksian woman".
His work has influenced such directors as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, John Carpenter, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Quentin Tarantino and Michael Mann. Entertainment Weekly placed Hawks fourth on their list of greatest directors, writing: "His hallmarks are more thematic than visual: men who adhere to an understated code of manliness; women who like to yank the rug out from under those men's feet; a mistrust of pomposity; a love of sly, leg-pulling wit. Yet there's the ease of the complete filmmaker in his Westerns, dramas, musicals, detective films, and supremely confident comedies. No wonder the French adored the guy: His casual profundity was the studio's best advertisement for itself." Jean-Luc Godard called him "the greatest of all American artists".
Early life and background
Howard Winchester Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana. He was the first-born child of Frank Winchester Hawks, a wealthy paper manufacturer, and his wife, Helen Brown, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Hawks' family on his father's side were American pioneers, and his ancestor John Hawks had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1630. The family eventually settled in Goshen and by the 1890s was one of the wealthiest families in the Midwest, due mostly to the highly profitable Goshen Milling Company.Hawks' maternal grandfather, C. W. Howard, had homesteaded in Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1862 at age 17. Within 15 years he had made his fortune in the town's paper mill and other industrial endeavors. Frank Hawks and Helen Howard met in the early 1890s and married in 1895. Howard Hawks was the eldest of five children, and his birth was followed by Kenneth Neil Hawks, William Bellinger Hawks, Grace Louise Hawks, and Helen Bernice Hawks. In 1898, the family moved back to Neenah where Frank Hawks began working for his father-in-law's Howard Paper Company.
Between 1906 and 1909, the Hawks family began to spend more time in Pasadena, California, during the cold Wisconsin winters in order to improve Helen Hawks' ill health. Gradually, they began to spend only their summers in Wisconsin before permanently moving to Pasadena in 1910. The family settled in a house down the street from Throop Polytechnic Institute, and the Hawks children began attending the school's Polytechnic Elementary School in 1907. Hawks was an average student and did not excel in sports, but by 1910 had discovered coaster racing, an early form of soapbox racing. In 1911, Hawks' youngest sibling, Helen, died suddenly of food poisoning. From 1910 to 1912, Hawks attended Pasadena High School. In 1912, the Hawks family moved to nearby Glendora, California, where Frank Hawks owned orange groves. Hawks finished his junior year of high school at Citrus Union High School in Glendora. During this time he worked as a barnstorming pilot.
He was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire from 1913 to 1914; his family's wealth may have influenced his acceptance to the elite private school. Even though he was 17, he was admitted as a lower middleclassman, the equivalent of a sophomore. While in New England, Hawks often attended the theaters in nearby Boston. In 1914, Hawks returned to Glendora and graduated from Pasadena High School that year. Skilled in tennis, at 18 Hawks won the United States Junior Tennis Championship. That same year, Hawks was accepted to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in mechanical engineering and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. His college friend Ray S. Ashbury remembered Hawks spending more of his time playing craps and drinking alcohol than studying, although Hawks was also known to be a voracious reader of popular American and English novels in college.
While working in the film industry during his 1916 summer vacation, Hawks made an unsuccessful attempt to transfer to Stanford University. He returned to Cornell that September, leaving in April 1917 to join the Army when the United States entered World War I. He served as a lieutenant in the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps. During World War I, he taught aviators to fly, and these experiences influenced future aviation films like The Dawn Patrol. Like many college students who joined the armed services during the war, he received a degree in absentia in 1918. Before Hawks was called for active duty, he returned to Hollywood and, by the end of April 1917, was working on a Cecil B. DeMille film.
Career
Entering films (1916–1925)
Howard Hawks' interest and passion for aviation led him to many important experiences and acquaintances. In 1916, Hawks met Victor Fleming, a Hollywood cinematographer who had been an auto mechanic and early aviator. Hawks had begun racing and working on a Mercer race car—bought for him by his grandfather C.W. Howard—during his 1916 summer vacation in California. He allegedly met Fleming when the two men raced on a dirt track and caused an accident. This meeting led to Hawks' first job in the film industry, as a prop boy on the Douglas Fairbanks film In Again, Out Again for Famous Players–Lasky. According to Hawks, a new set needed to be built quickly when the studio's set designer was unavailable, so Hawks volunteered to do the job himself, much to Fairbanks' satisfaction. He was next employed as a prop boy and general assistant on an unspecified film directed by Cecil B. DeMille.. By the end of April 1917, Hawks was working on Cecil B. DeMille's The Little American. Hawks worked on Marshall Neilan's The Little Princess, starring Mary Pickford. According to Hawks, Neilan did not show up to work one day, so the resourceful Hawks offered to direct a scene himself, to which Pickford consented. Hawks began directing at age 21 after he and cinematographer Charles Rosher filmed a double exposure dream sequence Pickford.Hawks worked with Pickford and Neilan again on Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley before joining the United States Army Air Service. Hawks' military records were destroyed in the 1973 Military Archive Fire, so the only account of his military service is his own. According to Hawks, he spent 15 weeks in basic training at the University of California in Berkeley where he was trained to be a squadron commander in the Air Service. When Pickford visited Hawks at basic training, his superior officers were so impressed by the appearance of the celebrity that they promoted him to flight instructor and sent him to Texas to teach new recruits. Bored by this work, Hawks attempted to secure a transfer during the first half of 1918 and was eventually sent to Fort Monroe, Virginia. The Armistice was signed in November of that year, and Hawks was discharged as a Second Lieutenant without having seen active duty.
After the war, Hawks was eager to return to Hollywood. His brother Kenneth Hawks, who had also served in the Air Service, graduated from Yale in 1919, and the two of them moved to Hollywood together to pursue their careers. They quickly made friends with Hollywood insider Allan Dwan. Hawks landed his first important job when he used his family's wealth to loan money to studio head Jack L. Warner. Warner quickly paid back the loan and hired Hawks as a producer to "oversee" the making of a new series of one-reel comedies starring the Italian comedian Monty Banks. Hawks later stated that he personally directed "three or four" of the shorts, though no documentation exists to confirm the claim. The films were profitable, but Hawks soon left to form his own production company using his family's wealth and connections to secure financing. The production company, Associated Producers, was a joint venture between Hawks, Allan Dwan, Marshall Neilan and director Allen Holubar, with a distribution deal with First National. The company made 14 films between 1920 and 1923, with eight directed by Neilan, three by Dwan and three by Holubar. More of a "boy's club" than a production company, the four men gradually drifted apart and went their separate ways in 1923, by which time Hawks had decided that he wanted to direct rather than produce.
Beginning in early 1920, Hawks lived in rented houses in Hollywood with the group of friends he was accumulating. This rowdy group of mostly macho, risk-taking men included his brother Kenneth Hawks, Victor Fleming, Jack Conway, Harold Rosson, Richard Rosson, Arthur Rosson, and Eddie Sutherland. During this time, Hawks first met Irving Thalberg, the vice-president in charge of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Hawks admired his intelligence and sense of story. Hawks also became friends with barn stormers and pioneer aviators at Rogers Airport in Los Angeles, getting to know men like Moye Stephens.
In 1923, Famous Players–Lasky president Jesse Lasky was looking for a new Production Editor in the story department of his studio, and Thalberg suggested Hawks. Hawks accepted and was immediately put in charge of over 40 productions, including several literary acquisitions of stories by Joseph Conrad, Jack London and Zane Grey. Hawks worked on the scripts for all of the films produced, but he had his first official screenplay credit in 1924 on Tiger Love. Hawks was the Story Editor at Famous Players for almost two years, occasionally editing such films as Heritage of the Desert. Hawks signed a new one-year contract with Famous-Players in the fall of 1924. He broke his contract to become a story editor for Thalberg at MGM, having secured a promise from Thalberg to make him a director within a year. In 1925, when Thalberg hesitated to keep his promise, Hawks broke his contract at MGM and left.