Something for the Birds

Robert Earl Wise was an American film director, producer and editor. He twice won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, for West Side Story and The Sound of Music . He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane and Best Picture for The Sand Pebbles . Among his other... films are The Body Snatcher; Born to Kill; The Set-Up; The Day the Earth Stood Still; Destination Gobi; Run Silent, Run Deep; I Want to Live!; The Haunting; The Andromeda Strain; The Hindenburg; and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Often contrasted with 'auteur' directors such as Stanley Kubrick who tended to bring a distinctive directorial "look" to a particular genre, Wise is famously viewed to have allowed his story to dictate style. Later critics such as Martin Scorsese expanded that characterization, insisting that despite Wise's notorious workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan.
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