1. Samuel Grosvenor Wood was an American film director and producer who is best known for having directed such Hollywood hits as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr Chips, The Pride of the Yankees, and For Whom the Bell Tolls and for his uncredited work directing parts of Gone with the Wind.
Sam Wood was involved in a few acting and writing projects.
Samuel Grosvenor Wood was born on July 10,1883, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to William Henry Wood and Katherine Wood.
When Sam Wood turned 18 years old in the summer of 1901, he and a companion began a year-long trek across the United States, ultimately arriving in Los Angeles, where Sam Wood embarked on a successful career as a real estate broker.
In 1908, Sam Wood married Clara Louise Roush, who encouraged her spouse to commit to a career in film.
Sam Wood demonstrated efficient and effective direction that made him attractive to Paramount executives.
Paramount, "perhaps as a sign of displeasure" obliged Sam Wood by demoting him to their subsidiary movie unit, Realart, a venue for the production of low-budget "routine programme pictures" that offered little in the way of substance.
Sam Wood endured the assignment, making four films at Realart, starring Ethel Clayton and Wanda Hawley, all filmed in 1920.
Sam Wood was all right, but he was a real estate dealer at heart.
DeMille, whom Sam Wood had served as an assistant director from 1914 to 1916, and Swanson, a close personal friend to Sam Wood, each influenced Paramount's choice.
However, In 1923 by mutual consent, Swanson and Sam Wood agreed to conclude their collaboration.
Sam Wood completed the "heavy-handed morality tale" His Children's Children at the end of 1923, and only made Bluff with Agnes Ayers under protest due to his low appraisal of Ayers' star potential.
Sam Wood accepted two offers from producer Irving "Sol" Lesser of the newly formed Principal Pictures to make "a most unusual film", The Female, set in the South African Veld starring Betty Compson, as well as a Western and Sam Wood's first effort in this genre, The Mine with the Iron Door with Dorothy Mackaill.
Sam Wood consented to make another film with Dorothy Mackaill for Paramount in The Next Corner that despite its "expensive production values" was burdened with a "meager plot".
Sam Wood was officially suspended from Paramount and the other major studios for a year.
When Sam Wood's adaptation proved a box office success, Paramount executives sought to lure Sam Wood back to the studio, bestowing on him a lavishly financed production, Fascinating Youth.
Sam Wood completed the "light comedy" but remained convinced that he had no future with Paramount and successfully arranged for a release from his contract.
Sam Wood directed Grange a second time in a small epic honoring horse racing.
Sam Wood proceeded to bring his signature speed and efficiency to M-G-M, directing their top stars and supplied with screenplays "of the slimmest material": Norma Shearer in The Latest from Paris, William Haines in Telling the World, the Duncan Sisters in It's a Great Life and in his first sound film in 1929, introduced actor Robert Montgomery.
Sam Wood directed silent matinee idol John Gilbert in a maritime romance-adventure Way for a Sailor, a vehicle that the actor hoped would redeem his reputation in the emerging "talkies".
Silent movie flapper and rising talkie star Joan Crawford was paired with Sam Wood for Paid, a crime drama that benefited from Sam Wood's "taut" execution and Charles Rosher's cinematography,.
Sam Wood followed with two less fortunate assignments and the last two of the four features he would make with William Haines: A Tailor Made Man and New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford, both 1931.
Sam Wood remade The Barbarian with emerging film star Myrna Loy as the object of Novarro's affection, who steals her from fiance Reginald Denny in this cinematic ally "attractive minor package".
Sam Wood directed Dressler in this fast-paced light comedy Prosperity, about a small-town bank president who spars with her provincial neighbors and patrons.
Sam Wood was reunited with Dressler in 1933 to make Christopher Bean, a light burlesque on the humorous aspects of greed.
Sam Wood served as both producer and director on Hold Your Man, a dual role that he did not relish within the "assembly-line" organization that prevailed in the major studios of the 1930s.
The assignment was a promotion for Sam Wood, providing him with the opportunity to make a crime-romance that is "sentimental, cheeky, wise-cracking" and as always "swiftly paced" and featuring two of M-G-M's top stars of the period, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable.
Sam Wood enjoyed the services of James Wong Howe's expert cinematography.
Sam Wood's handling the nihilistic Marx Brothers in A Night At The Opera.
Sam Wood's second effort was a "slick and glossy melodrama" with "M-G-M's stylish trimmings" with Loretta Young and Franchot Tone and a fine supporting cast: The Unguarded Hour.
The Marx Brothers arrived for the filming of A Day at the Races having tested new routines at burlesque venues, and Thalberg and Sam Wood were prepared to use this material to emulate the profitability of A Night At the Opera.
Sam Wood proceeded with the picture, adhering to the formula that balanced the "romance and musical numbers" with the fulsome humor offered in the Marx Brothers sequences.
Sam Wood furnished the studio with "good pieces of entertainment" in his next four works "but nothing memorable".
Madame X : A popular stage play by Alexandre Bisson that enjoyed numerous film adaptations until 1966, Sam Wood directed Gladys George as the long-suffering mother who sacrifices for her children.
Biographer Tony Thomas reports that the actress was one of the rare cases in which Sam Wood developed a personal dislike for a player.
Sam Wood traveled to England to make Goodbye, Mr Chips, the only professional sojourn of his career, part of an attempt by M-G-M to accommodate demands by British trade unions for a share of the lucrative American film exports market.
Sam Wood demonstrated his restraint in telling the inherently touching tale convincingly without lapsing into sentimentality.
Goodbye, Mr Chips won Donat a Best Actor Oscar, and Sam Wood received the first of his three Academy Award nominations for Best Director.
Sam Wood's parting assignment under M-G-M was to take over the filming of Gone with the Wind when the director Victor Fleming collapsed during shooting and did not return to the studio for a month.
Sam Wood personally handled some of the scenes that depict wounded Confederate troops at the Atlanta train depot.
Now operating as an independent agent, Sam Wood was instantly offered the option by his former associate and producer Irving "Sol" Lesser to adapt Thornton Wilder's play Our Town.
Lesser and Sam Wood convinced Wilder to permit one major alteration in his allegorical play: Emily Webb, played by Martha Scott, does not die in childbirth, but only in a dream sequence, a re-write that Wilder admitted was preferable in a cinematic treatment of his work.
Sam Wood returned to Paramount Pictures to make an action-packed Western that borders on a burlesque of the genre, Rangers of Fortune.
Sam Wood opted for RKO Pictures to film Norman Krasner's original screenplay The Devil and Miss Jones, a comedy starring Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn.
When beloved baseball player Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees died, aged thirty-seven in 1941 of ALS, a fatal neuromuscular disorder, Sam Wood determined that a film biography was in order.
Sam Wood proceeded to shoot numerous landscape scenes in the Sierra Nevada mountain range before the cast for the movie had been selected.
Production on the film was set aside while Sam Wood made The Pride of the Yankees; only when that project was completed did he return to For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Sam Wood was obliged to complete The Pride of the Yankees before he could commit himself fully to For Whom the Bell Tolls, already under production since late 1941.
Sam Wood was undoubtedly disappointed when "the major project of his career" did not garner him an Academy Award nomination, an honor that was bestowed on his cinematographer Ray Rennahan, his set designer William Cameron Menzies, musical director Victor Young and his four leading cast members, with Katina Paxinou winning Best Supporting Actress in her role as the revolutionary matron Pilar.
Sam Wood recalled the ordeal of filming For Whom the Bell Tolls:.
Sam Wood continued his collaboration with Cooper in a comedic vein after the delayed release of Saratoga Trunk with International Pictures' Casanova Brown, a vehicle intended to appeal to female movie patrons.
Sam Wood followed with Guest Wife starring Claudette Colbert and RKO's Heartbeat starring Ginger Rogers.
Sam Wood rejoined Ginger Rogers after their success in the romance Kitty Foyle to film a remake of French director Henri Decoin's 1939 Battement de coeur, in Heartbeat.
The picture would have been better served if Sam Wood possessed "the sly touch of a Guitry or a Lubitsch" rather than Sam Wood's obvious humor.
The film was strong on moods and mysteries and movement but there are those who felt that Sam Wood was too obvious in his story telling, that more subtly on his part would have produced an even better film.
Sam Wood returned to his sports metier when he was tasked with directing the story of Chicago White Sox major league pitcher Monty Stratton.
Director Sam Wood expertly recounted the athlete's struggle to adapt to the use of a prosthetic and return to professional baseball in the minor leagues.
Sam Wood became a committed and ardent anti-Communist in the years that saw the rise of McCarthyism in the late 1940s.
Sam Wood had been keeping a black notebook in which he wrote the names of those he considered subversive.
Sam Wood was a charter member of the Hollywood Republican Committee.
Shortly following a 1949 meeting of his Motion Picture Alliance in which he had protested against a liberal screenwriter who was suing the group for slandering him, Sam Wood suffered a fatal heart attack.
Sam Wood had added a condition to his will: no one, including his children, could collect their inheritance until they filed legal affidavits affirming that they had never been Communists.
Sam Wood died from a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 66.
Sam Wood's grave is located in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.
Sam Wood's death meant little to the public but it marked the end of a long and respectable film career.
Sam Wood had been in the business forty years and he had seen it grow from infancy to a major industry.
The work is the man: Sam Wood was uncomplicated, self-assured, clear-minded and he enjoyed working.