Battle of the Normans

The first competition of our director show-down will feature Norman Jewison and Norman Taurog. While initially I had never heard of either of these directors and they seemed to sprout from obscurity from my perspective of limited experience, they are actually incredibly influential, powerful directors with impressive carreers.

Norman Taurog was a director from the earliest days of American filmmaking in the 1920's. He primarily made short films in mass numbers. He became notable for the film Skippy, the adaptation of a comic strip involving impoverished children of the slums. This film won him his best director award in 1931. Unfortunately, we won't be able to watch his first big hit as it is not available on DVD. His next major film nomination came for the film Boys Town, which began Mickey Rooney's carreer. I'm very excited to see him as a teenager. From this point he became more known for comedies rather than hard-hitting dramatic films and his formula for easy-going, family films that involved elements of song was utilized when studios wished to bring Elvis Presley to the screen. Taurog and Presley teamed up for a number of films, all widely successful, including Jail House Rock and Blue Hawaii. Taurog's third most notable credit goes to uniting the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis for the first of many highly successful films. We will be watching Pardners, which is considered by many to be the quintessential Martin-Lewis team-up.

Norman Jewison was a highly successful director in the 60's and 70's working in the genres of light comedy, hard-hitting socially concious films, and musicals. One of Jewison's most notable musicals was Jesus Christ Superstar, which managed to tackle a grand theatrical story and bring the essence of the 1960's to the screen. The musical genre and social consciousness came together in the widely successful Fiddler on the Roof. This film granted him a nomination for Best Director from the Academy. He won Best Picture and Best Director for one of the most important race relation films of all time: In the Heat of the Night, which dared to talk about the highly current issue of race relations amid the riots occurring in the late 1960's. His work with race relations and film has never truly ended; in the late 90's, he produced The Hurricane, a film starring Denzel Washington as a boxer who has been wrongfully convicted of a crime and spends life in prison.

I´m very excited to see how this match-up turns out, but seeing as the victor will be meeting up with Wyler, they probably will only see two rounds.