William Wellman summary

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William Wellman, (born Feb. 29, 1896, Brookline, Mass, U.S.—died Dec. 9, 1975, Los Angeles, Calif.), U.S. film director. He was a flying ace in World War I and later a barnstorming stunt pilot. He acted in Knickerbocker Buckeroo (1919) with Douglas Fairbanks before turning to directing. Known as “Wild Bill,” he made the aerial dogfight classic film Wings (1927, Academy Award), setting standards for documentary realism, and he launched a gangster movie trend with Public Enemy (1931), starring James Cagney. The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), considered one of his best films, examined frontier justice in the American West. In Track of the Cat (1954), Wellman experimented with the minimal use of colour. His other films include A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), The Story of GI Joe (1945), and The High and the Mighty (1954).

Academy Award Summary

Academy Award, any of a number of awards presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, located in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., to recognize achievement in the film industry. The awards were first presented in 1929, and winners receive a gold-plated statuette commonly

directing Summary

Directing, the craft of controlling the evolution of a performance out of material composed or assembled by an author. The performance may be live, as in a theatre and in some broadcasts, or it may be recorded, as in motion pictures and the majority of broadcast material. The term is also used in

film Summary

Film, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film