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Acknowledgments The George Stevens Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences comprises one of the library’s largest holdings—an appropriate distinction for the man who directed some of Hollywood’s largest films just as the studio system was coming to an end—including A Place in the Sun, Shane, Giant, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. Yet Stevens remains a man difficult to know. He was soft-spoken, often scarce of words when working . A private person whose single passion was making films, Stevens’s interior life remained largely hidden. This book, the beginning of my work on Stevens, is a biography of sorts that seeks to understand that interiority and to track it. I look at Stevens through dialogues about the cinema —often spoken by friends and colleagues, and Stevens himself. More than anything else I look through the lens of what he loved best—his films. I mean to place him squarely where he belongs: in the center of the always lively history and the culture of the American cinema. Influenced by its founding giants, D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, and Frank Borzage , Stevens learned his craft swiftly in the early days of the industry. Perhaps more than any other director of his generation alongside John Ford, Stevens is a distinctly American artist, his films reaching for, in Stevens’s words, the all important pictorial view of the American character and landscape. His best example, Giant, is a huge kind of American haiku, emblematic, iconic, displaying the characteristic Stevens frame that positions men and women in their all important relation to the physical environment. For Stevens that frame is fundamental. His films came first in his life. In a letter home to his wife written during World War II, Stevens wrote a poem in what he called “the spirit of Robert Burns,” then recanted, saying that his job was not to write poems but to make “moompitchers .” Perhaps, his “moompitchers” were poems after all. xi IwanttothankGeorgeStevensJr.,whocarefullyreadchaptersandprovided comments, corrections, and offered insights into his father’s life and career. I am indebted to Ned Comstock, archivist and brilliant overachiever at the USC Cinema-Television Library, who never stopped searching for and sending information on Stevens. I especially thank Barbara Hall, research archivist at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who spent the good part of four years advising and pulling files for me from the George Stevens Collection. I thank also Val Almendarez, collections archivist at the Margaret Herrick Library, who provided valuable assistance. A thank you also goes to Dottie McCarthy in George Stevens Jr.’s office, who faxed and emailed unfailingly to get information to me. I am grateful for close friends and colleagues who listened patiently to hours of talk on Stevens, bouncing ideas around and becoming unwitting Stevens scholars: Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Harley W. Lond, a fine editor, Pamela Edwards, Virginia Crane, Gayle (G. G.) Golden, Bob Pincus, Miles Beller, Greg Rose, Linda Civitello, and, of course, Steven Gould Axelrod. Thank you also to Bruce Petri, an early Stevens scholar, for his constant encouragement, and to my parents for their babysitting duties and all-around support. Also at the Margaret Herrick Library I warmly thank Linda Harris Mehr, director of the library, Stacey Behlmer, Faye Thompson, and Jenny Romero. Thanks as well to the library’s Special Collections staff, who pulled files, photocopied and provided some well-needed comic relief on days when Stevens loomed especially large and seemed almost impossible to know. I also appreciate the help of the staff at UCLA Special Collections. I am especially grateful to Stevens’s colleagues and other experts who took the time to talk to me: Jim Silke, Millie Perkins, Earl Holliman, Richard Schickel, Bob Thomas, Bob Hinkle, and Jane Withers . At the University of Wisconsin Press, my thanks go to my editor Adam Mehring, to my copyeditor Mara Naselli, and of course to humanities editor Raphael Kadushin. Most of all I thank the late Ivan Moffat, who was there at the beginning of my research and with whom I spent many enjoyable lunches discussing his friend, George Stevens. Ivan was a constant source of information and generously read a draft of my first written chapter on A Place in the Sun. Sadly, he passed away before he could see this book. I am indebted to him. xii Acknowledgments...

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