What can we learn from Preston Sturges?

Preston Sturges has inspired and taught me a lot over the years. Here are some take aways.

I have always had a soft spot for Preston Sturges. The knee jerk writer’s reaction is to is to relish his dialogue. Sharp and quick and Aaron Sorkin like in its patterns. If I have learned anything from pros when they are alive, it’s that they never really give away their secrets and if they wanted to have been teachers, they would have been. Everything you need to know is in the pudding. Hence me using what writers like Preston Sturges left behind to teach me everything I want to know.

Behold, there’s Barbara Stanwyck delivering her knock out blows to Henry Fonda in The LADY EVE. Marvel in the deadpan reading of Joel McCrea walking around in a pointless struggle against the man in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. The banter is one thing, but the mind for what is comedy is another and there are so few writers who know how to do it properly.

Reading his autobiography Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges was one of the key moments in my cinematic education. Less for the tools on craft and more for the kind of life that makes good fodder for comedy. Often it is the way you frame life’s misadventures that makes for comedy or drama. Exhibit a) there is one anecdote in his book that sticks out about a man committing suicide. Not exactly material for a bust up, i know but hear him out...

A man is standing at the edge of the Time/Life building. Or at least I think it was the Time/Life building. Don’t ask me how he managed to get up there. It matters not how he found an open window. He is now looking out over the edge, pondering his insignificance and the failures of his life when, as he looks down to get a good gander at his penny loafers dangling over the edge, he spots another basket case below him …. about to jump. Turns out another knuckle head at the Time/Life building has got the same idea. “Get your own ledge! This is my place to end it all!”, he feels like exclaiming. But before our hero can get a word out, the jumper below beats him to it. Preston watches as the man plummets unceremoniously to his death. Long story medium sized: Preston decides maybe he does not have a death wish after all. Maybe a cup of coffee and a bagel seem a better option right about now.

The fact that I am no longer certain whether this is an anecdote about Preston Sturges himself or one of his characters makes me love this guy even more. Preston knew what many modern writers do not: the key to writing great comedy is the celebration of failure and Preston’s autobiography presents a young man with a catalogue of failings. His father walked out on them. Then his mother moved them all to Paris to live with Isadora Duncan as you do. But this isn’t even the high light of the autobiography. His family had just about given up on him by the time he had driven all his family business ventures into the ground. I think it was shoes. Preston dwells on his own failures as the high point of his development. He knows they make him insightful. They make him human. They know they gave him his funny bone.

He turned losing into a promising venture by writing about it because he understood it. Intimately.

And then the world changed for him. First on Broadway and then on the silver screen. He became the most powerful writer director of his era as he knew his worth. You’re not going to learn to write as well as Preston Sturges but you may end up understanding that writing good comedy comes from putting into context one’s failures.

Would SULLIVAN’s TRAVELS have had the chance of being as meaningful if it wasn’t written by an author who knew failure? Witness Joel McCrea here bring mocked for his self importance. He is the hero of the story of SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS but he is at once admired and mocked by Preston himself. I love how he can’t edit himself fast enough. The dialogue sparkles as the screenwriter here reads the mind of his producers '“yes…. with a little sex in it.”

Has there ever been a perfect comedy match as effective as Preston’s creation of the Barbara Stanwyck character in LADY EVE? It’s a lesson in how to introduce a character.

There are so many levels to this scene. A pocket mirror provides the visuals while Barbara narrates the psychology of Henry Fonda’s would be female suitors as they try and pick him up but to no avail. They all fail. It is such an effective demonstration of character, effective scene progression and just sheer comic timing that you can learn more from Sturges in one sitting of LADY EVE than you could in an entire comedy master class. And I am not just talking about the rat a tat screwball comedy dialogue.

I think my point is rather to get to a higher plane of comedy you have to understand human weakness and celebrate it. It’s the loser that is interesting in comedy and in order to be a winner in the art of it, you have to know failure. Wear it out. Be comfortable enough in it to make it fashionable.

Preston teaches all of this but it is in the ingredients of a failed life that you find the means to rise from the ashes. So take comfort. Your failures in life, if properly observed could serve as ingredients for your future comedy masterpiece. Or maybe just a private chuckle. Either way, there is a lot to do with them besides learn.