Robert Wise

Robert Wise: From Splicing Room to Best Picture, Twice Over

Robert Wise never trained as a director. He got into movies because his older brother worked in RKO's shipping department and could get him a job there during the Depression, and he learned filmmaking one cut at a time, in the editing room, on a picture that would later be voted the greatest ever made. Three decades after that apprenticeship, he became the only director in history to win Best Picture and Best Director twice, for two of the most commercially successful musicals ever produced.

A Depression-Era Start in the Shipping Room

Robert Earl Wise was born September 10, 1914, in Winchester, Indiana, to Earl Wise, a meat packer, and Olive Longenecker. He grew up in Connersville, Indiana, wrote for his high school paper and yearbook, and won a journalism scholarship to Franklin College in 1933 — only to be forced out after a single year by the Depression. His brother David, already working at RKO Pictures in Hollywood, arranged an entry-level job for him there. Wise started in shipping, moved into the sound department, and apprenticed under editors T. K. Wood and William Hamilton, cutting his teeth on pictures like *Stage Door* (1937) before landing his first solo editing credits on *Bachelor Mother* and *My Favorite Wife* in 1939.

Editing Citizen Kane

Wise's defining early credit was editing Orson Welles's *Citizen Kane* (1941), work that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Film Editing and put him inside the filmmaking style — deep-focus cinematography, layered sound — that would shape his own directing later. He went on to edit Welles's *The Magnificent Ambersons* (1942), a more fraught assignment: when the studio, over Welles's objections, ordered the film recut and shortened while Welles was out of the country, it was Wise who carried out much of that re-editing, occasionally directing replacement scenes himself. In 2012 the Motion Picture Editors Guild ranked *Citizen Kane* the second-best-edited film of all time.

Becoming a Director by Necessity

Wise got his first directing credit almost by accident, in 1944, stepping in on *The Curse of the Cat People* when the original director fell behind schedule. The assignment led to a run of moody, low-budget genre pictures for producer Val Lewton, including *The Body Snatcher* (1945) with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and established a pattern that would define Wise's career: genre-hopping range rather than a single signature style. Through the late 1940s he made film noir (*Born to Kill*, *Blood on the Moon*) and the boxing drama *The Set-Up* (1949), which won the Critics' Prize at Cannes and became a template for fight films that followed.

Genre-Hopping Through the 1950s

Wise spent the 1950s proving there was almost no genre he couldn't handle. *The Day the Earth Stood Still* (1951) became one of science fiction's most influential films; he also directed melodrama, Westerns, and the Paul Newman boxing biography *Somebody Up There Likes Me* (1956). *I Want to Live!* (1958), built around Susan Hayward's Oscar-winning performance as a condemned murderer, brought Wise his first Best Director nomination and was among 1959's top-grossing films.

Two Best Pictures in Five Years

Wise's career peaked in the 1960s with an unmatched run. *West Side Story* (1961), co-directed with choreographer Jerome Robbins, won ten of its eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and made Wise and Robbins the first pair to share a Best Director award. Four years later, *The Sound of Music* (1965) repeated the trick outright: Wise alone won Best Director as the film also took Best Picture, becoming one of the highest-grossing movies in history. In between, he directed the ghost story *The Haunting* (1963), adapted from Shirley Jackson's novel, and *The Sand Pebbles* (1966), an antiwar epic starring Steve McQueen in his only Oscar-nominated performance — a film critics regard as Wise's last creative peak.

A Long Slow Fade, and Star Trek

Wise's later career cooled commercially. The musical *Star!* (1968) flopped, and *The Hindenburg* (1975) won technical Oscars despite critical scorn. *The Andromeda Strain* (1971) held up better with reviewers, and *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* (1979) was a commercial success that critics, including Leonard Maltin, dismissed as "slow, talky, and derivative" apart from its special effects. His final theatrical feature was the small musical *Rooftops* (1989); at 86 he directed the television film *A Storm in Summer* (2000), which won a Daytime Emmy.

Guild Statesman

As his directing output slowed, Wise became one of Hollywood's most senior institutional figures, serving as president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1985 to 1988. He collected the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (1966), the D.W. Griffith Award (1988), the National Medal of Arts (1992), and the AFI Life Achievement Award (1998).

Personal Life and Death

Wise married actress Patricia Doyle in 1942; she died of cancer in 1975, and their son Robert became an assistant cameraman. In 1977 Wise married Millicent Franklin, a self-described *Star Trek* fan who had appeared in one of his films. Wise died of a heart attack on September 14, 2005, four days after his 91st birthday, at UCLA Medical Center.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

Wise's genius, insofar as the word fits, is a craftsman's genius rather than an auteur's: an unusual mastery of editing rhythm and structure, carried over intact when he moved from the splicing bench to the director's chair, that let him work fluently across horror, noir, war films, science fiction, and big-budget musicals without ever settling into a signature visual style. NPR titled its obituary of him "A Genius for Story," locating his gift specifically in structure and pacing — the editor's instincts for what to cut and when to hold — rather than in singular visionary ideas of the kind usually associated with the word.

The honest counter-case is that Wise was, by his own account and his critics', a consummate professional and a versatile technician more than an innovator: he did not originate a style the way Welles or Hitchcock did, and several of his biggest late-career films (*Star Trek: The Motion Picture*, *The Hindenburg*) succeeded on spectacle rather than vision. His two Best Picture wins reflect popular and industry consensus at least as much as artistic daring.

Legacy

Wise's four Academy Awards, his editing work on a film regularly named the best ever made, and two of the most enduringly popular musicals in movie history secure him a place among Hollywood's most productive and adaptable careers — proof that mastery of a craft's fundamentals could carry a filmmaker across five decades of changing genres and technology.

Achievements

• National Medal of Arts
• Academy Award for Best Director — 1966
• Academy Award for Best Picture — 1966
• Educated at Franklin College and Connersville High School
• Worked as film director, film producer and film editor