Yesterday I posted a video showing director Mark Robson on the set of ‘Valley Of The Dolls’. Today we hear the audio of a half hour interview with director John Sturges (‘Bad Day At Black Rock’, ‘Magnificent Seven’, ‘The Great Escape’ etc.) The two men have quite a few things in common. Both are mid-century studio filmmakers who tackled a fairly wide variety of genres, though Sturges leaned more on the war/western genre’s and less on the soap operas which were a specialty of Robson (hence his presence on ‘Valley Of The Dolls’–he also directed ‘Peyton Place’). Both were born within a few years of each other–Sturges in 1910, Robson in 1913–and both began as film editors at RKO. After apprenticeships on lower-budget dramas–Robson at RKO and Sturges in the ‘B’ unit at MGM–both had breakout movies that moved them up to the ‘A’ list, Robson with ‘Champion’ and Sturges with ‘Bad Day At Black Rock’. Both made their last movies in the mid-70s–Robson died of a heart attack shortly after shooting ‘Avalanche Express’. Sturges seems to have simply grown bored with the process; in Tom Mankewicz’s memoir he discusses Sturges last film ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ which Mankiewicz wrote. He paints a picture of Sturges drinking while shooting, not bothering with necessary coverage and abandoning the film in post, not bothering to edit his own film. Instead he ‘went off on a yacht somewhere’ and was never heard from again in Hollywood. He lived another fifteen or so years and died of emphysema at age 82. I enjoy listening to Sturges no-nonsense discussion of directing in the above clips. And, despite the emphysema, I enjoy the nicotine-coated vocal delivery.