George Seaton
George Seaton was an accomplished American screenwriter, playwright, and director, noted for his significant contributions to film and theater. His career can be divided into three distinct phases: beginning as a collaborative screenwriter, transitioning to solo screenplay work, and ultimately becoming a director of his own films. Seaton initially pursued acting but shifted gears after an unsuccessful stint in the business world during the Great Depression. He gained recognition as the voice of the Lone Ranger on Detroit's WXYZ radio station, which marked the start of his creative journey.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Seaton collaborated with major studios, notably Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia Pictures, contributing to successful Marx Brothers films and adapting various literary works into screenplays. His most celebrated work includes the screenplay for "Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street," which earned him an Academy Award. In the later part of his career, Seaton founded Perlberg-Seaton Productions, allowing him greater control over his projects. Notable films from this period include "The Country Girl," which also won him an Academy Award, and the disaster film "Airport," which influenced the genre significantly in the 1970s. Seaton's diverse body of work reflects his versatility and enduring impact on American cinema.
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George Seaton
Film Producer
- Born: April 17, 1911
- Birthplace: South Bend, Indiana
- Died: July 28, 1979
- Place of death: Beverly Hills, California
Biography
One may chart George Seaton’s career into three phases, beginning with his participation as part of a team writing screenplays, then as a screenwriter working on his own, and finally as a solo artist writing and directing his own films. In the meantime he also wrote for the stage with at least two plays on Broadway—one of which, But Not Goodbye, he turned into a novel that found greater success than the play had had on stage.
The pathway that led Seaton into this career took many twists and turns. He had plans for a pursuing higher education at the best schools and enrolled in Phillips Exeter Academy, planning to go on to Yale. Instead he dropped out of the academy after one year with the thought of going on stage as an actor. His parents persuaded him to try the business world and he managed to get a job in a brokerage firm in New York City in October 1929—and immediately found himself without a job. He returned to acting, while writing and publishing “true confessions” stories. The Detroit radio station WXYZ hired him to play the Lone Ranger for their radio series, which gave him some notice, particularly for his “Hi-Yo Silver!” which he invented because he could not whistle when called for by the script. By then he had changed his name from Stenius to Seaton, a name he took from Philip Barry’s play Holiday.
Producer Jed Harris optioned Seaton’s But Not Goodbye for a film that was initially censored but finally was produced in 1946 as The Cockeyed Miracle. Despite the delay, iit led to the start of Seaton’s Hollywood career. In 1933, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) hired him as a junior writer and he collaborated on a number of scripts. Most successful were the Marx Brothers scripts, especially A Day at the Races, written with Robert Pirosh in 1937.
In the 1940’s, Seaton went to work for Columbia Pictures and then Twentieth Century Fox. Now most of Seaton’s screenplays were his own work. Many were adaptations—and very successful. They include such films as Charley’s Aunt from Brandon Thomas’s play; This Thing Called Love (with Ken Englund) from Edwin Burke’s play; The Song of Bernadette, from Franz Werfel’s novel; The Meanest Man in the World, from the play by George M. Cohen; and The Eve of St. Mark, from Maxwell Anderson’s play. Probably his best-known and most enduring play from this period was Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street based on a storyline provided by Valentine Davies. It earned Seaton and Davies the Academy Award for best screenplay that year.
From 1945 onward, Seaton sought to direct his own work as the only way he saw to maintain control. This he could do consistently after he and William Perlberg founded Perlberg-Seaton Productions in 1952, working under the aegis of Paramount. Some of the significant films in this last phase of his career include Little Boy Lost, The Country Girl (based on Clifford Odets’s play and winner of a second Academy Award), and two spy films, Thirty-Six Hours and The Counterfeit Traitor. He had his own version of the bird flu epidemic with What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? In this movie, a bird infects people with an illness that causes them to be happy. His last film was Airport, which inspired a whole series of disaster films in the 1970’s.