Simon & Schuster
November 1999
On Sale: November 11, 1999
Featuring: John Ford
656 pages ISBN: 0684811618 EAN: 9780684811611 Kindle: B007Z4RWSW Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
"When the legend becomes fact, print the
legend." This line comes from director John Ford's
film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but it also
serves as an epigram for the life of the legendary
filmmaker.
Through a career that spanned decades and
included work on dozens of films -- among them such American
masterpieces as The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, The
Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and How Green Was My
Valley -- John Ford managed to leave as his legacy a
body of work that few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet as
bold as the stamp of his personality was on each film, there
was at the same time a marked reticence when it came to
revealing anything personal. Basically shy, and intensely
private, he was known to enjoy making up stories about
himself, some of them based loosely on fact but many of them
pure fabrications. Ford preferred instead to let his films
speak for him, and the message was always masculine,
determined, romantic, yes, but never soft -- and always,
always totally "American." If there were other aspects to
his personality, moods and subtleties that weren't reflected
on the screen, then no one really needed to
know.
Indeed, what mattered to Ford was always what
was up there on the screen. And if it varied from reality,
what did it matter? When you are creating legend, fact
becomes a secondary matter.
Now, in this definitive
look at the life and career of one of America's true
cinematic giants, noted biographer and critic Scott Eyman,
working with the full participation of the Ford estate, has
managed to document and delineate both aspects of John
Ford's life -- the human being and the legend.
Going
well beyond the legend, Eyman has explored the many
influences that were brought to play on this remarkable and
complex man, and the result is a rich and involving story of
a great film director and of the world in which he lived, as
well as the world of Hollywood legend that he helped to
shape. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews and
research on three continents, Scott Eyman explains how a
saloon-keeper's son from Maine helped to shape America's
vision of itself, and how a man with only a high school
education came to create a monumental body of work,
including films that earned him six Academy Awards -- more
than any filmmaker before or since. He also reveals the
truth of Ford's turbulent relationship with actress
Katharine Hepburn, recounts his stand for freedom of speech
during the McCarthy witch-hunt -- including a confrontation
with archconservative Cecil B. DeMille -- and discusses his
disfiguring alcoholism as well as the heroism he displayed
during World War II.
Brilliant, stubborn, witty,
rebellious, irascible, and contradictory, John Ford remains
one of the enduring giants in what is arguably America's
greatest contribution to art -- the Hollywood movie. In
Print the Legend, Scott Eyman has managed at last to
separate fact from legend in writing about this remarkable
man, producing what will remain the definitive biography of
this film giant
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