Gordon Douglas (director)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Gordon Douglas (Gordon Douglas Brickner) (December 15, 1907September 29, 1993) was an American film director, who directed many different genres of films over the course of a five-decade career in motion pictures. He was a native of New York City.

Contents

Douglas got his start as a child actor, and as a teenager became employed at the Hal Roach studio, working in the office and appearing in bit parts in various Hal Roach films. He made walk-on appearances in at least two Our Gang shorts: 1930’s Teacher’s Pet and 1932’s Birthday Blues. By 1934, Douglas was assistant to director Gus Meins, and served as assistant director on Laurel and Hardy’s 1934 film Babes in Toyland, and on the Our Gang comedies made between 1934 and mid-1936.

Beginning with Bored of Education in 1936, Our Gang moved from two-reel (twenty-minute) comedies to one-reel (ten-minute) comedies, and Douglas became the senior director of the series. Bored of Education won the 1936 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film, and was the only Our Gang entry ever honored with the award. Douglas remained with the series as director for two years. His Our Gang films, featuring Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Porky, Buckwheat, Waldo, Butch, and Woim, are the most familiar films in the series’ twenty-two year canon.

Hal Roach sold the Our Gang unit, including Douglas’ contract, to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in May 1938. Douglas only directed two MGM Our Gangs before deciding that he could not get used to the more industrialized atmosphere at the larger studio and returned to Roach. During his second tenure at Roach, Douglas directed Zenobia with Oliver Hardy, Saps at Sea with Laurel and Hardy, and All-American Co-Ed with former Our Gang kid Johnny Downs.

Douglas left Roach for RKO Radio Pictures in 1942, where he directed a number of b-movies, including Nazi satire, The Devil with Hitler. He migrated from there to Columbia Pictures in 1947, and then to Warner Bros. in 1950. At Warner studios, Douglas directed a number of successful films, including Liberace's Sincerely Yours (1955), and the sci-fi classic Them!. Later films for other studios included Call Me Bwana, Frank Sinatra's The Detective, Sidney Poitier's, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! and Follow That Dream for Elvis Presley.

Douglas died of cancer on September 29, 1993 in Los Angeles, California at the age of 85.

In 1987 Bob Groves of the Albuquerque Jounal interviewed Douglas for the newspaper's magazine section, Impact. The interview, published as a cover story December 8, 1987, provides interesting details on the making of what many consider Douglas's most famous film.

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.