Preston Sturges was a born storyteller, he just didn’t know it. For a very long time.
He was also born to make screwball comedies—for a while, he actually lived a screwball plot. He started dating Eleanor Hutton, a proper heiress with a high society family. He dated a lot of girls, but this one struck a nerve. They started thinking seriously about marriage. But when these thoughts were shared with the Hutton clan, there were the usual “oh my!”s and monocles dropping into wineglasses. The Huttons were sure their daughter was acting up to provoke them, certain this roustabout boyfriend of hers was just a gold-digger.
But threatening to cut her off did not deter the boyfriend. Instead, the two eloped—while the papers went mad with the story of the runaway heiress and her playwright lover.
For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that Sturges’ movie-ready romance turned out to be a bust. Instead, let’s spend some time luxuriating in this period of Preston’s life, when he started to find his way into Hollywood, in the most half-assed way possible.
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We start with our hero dating an actress (this was pre-Eleanor, but it doesn’t really matter that much. We’re not talking about a man for whom monogamy was that big of a thing). He doesn’t share the name of this actress in his memoirs, but we do know this: she kept picking fights with him, out of nowhere.
Eventually, she explained to poor befuddled Preston that this was all a gimmick. She was writing a play, and was trying out the dialog on him to see how he responded. It seems she was writing this play about him, and wanted the fictional buffoon on stage to be every bit as numbskulled as the real idiot she’d been dating (or something to this effect—remember, we only got Preston’s side of the story).
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This triggered Sturges’ most primal “anything-you-can-do-I-do-better” instinct, so he holed up in his apartment and hammered out a play. Well, sorta. He wrote the last third of one—then realized that if he was going to be a professional writer he might need to actually finish the thing. So he ground out another two acts, shopped it around town, and eventually got it produced off-off-Broadway for a whole week.
It was called The Guinea Pig. And with enough grit and determination, Sturges leveraged the one-week trial run into a proper entrée to Broadway, where he eventually got a backer and mounted his own production in 1929.
But he was still an international roue, though. He’d been one of those for many long years, and a playwright for only weeks. (Seriously, go check out his autobiography—he is perhaps the biggest comedy director in Hollywood pre-Mel Brooks/pre-Adam McKay, but you’ll be at page 267 out of 340 before you get to anything about movies). So he scuttled off back to Monte Carlo to squander some money pointlessly, and was traveling with a pretty girl (another nameless lass). She wondered, “What are your intentions?” He replied, “Strictly dishonorable.”
He realized this clever wordplay was the makings of another hit play (how it actually played out for the night in question he kept to himself).
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Six days hard days of writing later (what a workaholic!) and he had a script. He posted it to producer Brock Pemberton, and then full of smugness he boasted to his father that by 11:30 am Saturday he’d be getting an offer. Papa hung his head in exhausted desperation. Preston smiled, and explained he’d calculated exactly how much time would elapse between dropping the manuscript at the post office and the earliest moment Pemberton could have finished reading.
And sure enough, at 11:30 am Saturday the doorbell rang—with the postal delivery guy returning the package for insufficient postage.
(waa-waa)
Yes, Preston Sturges told that story in his memoir. Was it true? Almost certainly not, but he did not become one of Hollywood’s greatest comedy directors by worrying too much about what was true.
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Eventually, Pemberton did read the manuscript for Strictly Dishonorable and did put an offer on it. And it opened in September 1929 to sold-out houses, and ran as one of Broadway’s hottest tickets for a long, long time. Sturges was now a celebrity. He started writing movie freelance (The Big Pond, Fast and Loose) and kept writing plays.
But here’s the thing: the plays were flops. Audiences apparently enjoyed them, but critics attacked them. And when I say, “critics,” I am talking about a tight circle of Manhattan writers you can count on the fingers of two hands. Their barbed words were powerful enough to make or break stage shows. And they preferred to break them, as if keeping Broadway safe for super-perfection was a noble goal requiring relentless vigilance.
And meanwhile—those films… Remember them? Probably not. But they made money. Because Hollywood sent films out across the nation—and no single critic was powerful enough to kill even the stupidest film. You could make films, and play with them. And survive—films were critic-proof.
So, Preston Sturges—a brilliant, gifted comedy writer the likes of which come along perhaps once every hundred years—was driven out of live theater and into Hollywood, because that was the only place he could avoid bankruptcy (although, being an incompetent businessmen, he drove himself into bankruptcy anyway).
And his first gig in Hollywood? An uncredited rewrite artist on James Whale’s The Invisible Man. So… there ya go.
