Duel in the Sun

King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned nearly seven decades. In 1979 he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator." He was nominated five times for a Best Director... Oscar, and won eight international film awards during his career. He was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. His grandfather, Charles Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s. A freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist, Vidor made his debut as a director in 1913 with The Grand Military Parade. In Hollywood from 1915, he worked as a screenwriter and as director of a series of six short juvenile-delinquency films for Judge Willis Brown before directing his first feature, The Turn in the Road, in 1919. A successful mounting of Peg o' My Heart in 1922 got him a long term contract with Goldwyn Studios, later to be absorbed into MGM.
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William Dieterle was a German actor and film director, who worked in Hollywood for much of his career. His best known films include The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His 1937 film The Life of Emile Zola won the Academy Award for Best Picture.... He was born Wilhelm Dieterle, the youngest child of nine, to Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. As a child, he lived in considerable poverty and earned money by various means including carpentry and as a scrap dealer. He became interested in theater early and would stage productions in the family barn for friends and family. At the age of sixteen he had joined a traveling theater company as a handy-man, scene shifter and apprentice actor. His striking good looks and ambition soon paved the way as a leading romantic actor in theater productions. In 1919, he attracted the attention of Max Reinhardt in Berlin who hired him as an actor for his productions until 1924. He started acting in German films in 1921 to make more money and quickly became a popular character actor.
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Josef von Sternberg — born Jonas Sternberg — was an Austrian-American film director. He is particularly noted for his distinctive mise en scène, use of lighting and soft lens, and seven-film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich. Von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to a... Jewish family in Vienna. When he was two years old the family moved to America, and he spent most of his childhood in New York City and Lynbrook, New York. His father, Moses Sternberg, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary, twice tried to make a home for the family in the US before finding employment as a lace worker. . Von Sternberg dropped out of Jamaica High School and worked as an errand boy in a lace warehouse. He later obtained a job cleaning and repairing movie prints, and by about 1915 found himself working for William A.
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William Cameron Menzies was an Academy Award-winning American film production designer and art director who also worked as a director, producer, and screenwriter during a career spanning five decades. He earned acclaim for his work in silent movies, and later pioneered the use of color in film... for dramatic effect. Menzies was born in New Haven, Connecticut to Scots immigrant parents, Charles A. and Helen originally from Aberfeldy, Scotland. 1910 US Census He studied at Yale and the University of Edinburgh, and after serving in the US Army during World War I he attended the Art Students League of New York. Menzies joined Famous Players-Lasky working in special effects and design. Menzies established himself in Hollywood with his elaborate settings for The Thief of Bagdad , The Bat , The Dove , Sadie Thompson , and Tempest . In 1929, Menzies partnered with producer Joseph M.
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Sidney Arnold Franklin was an American film director and producer. Franklin, like William C. deMille, specialized in adapting literary works or Broadway stage plays. His brother Chester Franklin also became a director during the silent film era best known for helming the early Technicolor film Toll of the Sea.

Otto Brower was an American film director. He directed 45 films between 1928 and 1946. He was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and died in Hollywood, California, from a heart attack.

David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture. Born David Selznick to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was the son of silent movie distributor Lewis J.... Selznick and Florence A. Selznick. Selznick added the "O" to his name later on a whim. He studied at Columbia University and worked as an apprentice for his father until the elder's bankruptcy in 1923. In 1926, Selznick moved to Hollywood, and with the help of his father's connections, got a job as an assistant story editor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He left MGM for Paramount Pictures in 1928, where he worked until 1931, when he joined RKO as Head of Production. His years at RKO were fruitful, and he worked on many films, including A Bill of Divorcement , What Price Hollywood? , Rockabye , Our Betters , and King Kong . While at RKO, he also gave George Cukor his directing break. In 1933 he returned to MGM to establish a second prestige production unit, parallel to that of Irving Thalberg, who was in poor health.
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