- Jules White
Infobox_actor
bgcolour = silver
name = Jules White
imagesize =
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birthname = Jules Weiss
birthdate = birth date|1900|9|17|mf=y
location =Budapest ,Hungary
deathdate = death date and age|1985|4|30|1900|9|17
deathplace =Van Nuys, California
USA
height = 5' 9" (1.75 m)
othername =
yearsactive = 1924-1974
spouse =
homepage =
notable role =
academyawards =Jules White born Jules Weiss (
17 September 1900 -30 April 1985 ) was a movie director and producer. He is best known for his short-subject comedies starring theThree Stooges .Biography
Early years
White began working in motion pictures in the 1910s, as a child actor, for Pathé Studios. By the 1920s his brother Jack White had become a successful comedy producer at
Educational Pictures , and Jules worked for him as afilm editor . Jules became a director in 1926, specializing in comedies.In 1930 White and his boyhood friend Zion Myers moved to the prestigious
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. They conceived and co-directed M-G-M's gimmicky "Dogville" comedies, which featured trained dogs in satires of recent Hollywood films (like "The Dogway Melody" and "All Quiet on the Canine Front"). White and Myers co-directed theBuster Keaton feature "Sidewalks of New York", and launched a series of "Goofy Movies," one-reel parodies of silent-era melodramas.At Columbia Pictures
In 1933 White was appointed head of
Columbia Pictures ' short-subject division, which became the most prolific comedy factory in Hollywood. In a time when theaters were playing more double-feature programs, fewer short comedies were being made; by the mid-1930s three major comedy producers,Hal Roach ,Educational Pictures , andUniversal Pictures , scaled back their operations. Not Jules White: by 1938 Columbia's two-reel-comedy department was so busy that White split it into two units. White produced for the first unit;Hugh McCollum for the second. The Columbia comedy stars alternated between the White and McCollum units.With McCollum now shouldering some of the administrative burden, White was now free to pursue his first love: directing. He began directing the Columbia shorts in 1938 and would become the department's most prolific director. His approach was rooted in silent comedy, so he made his sound films the same way. He paced the visual action very fast, and coached his actors to gesture broadly and react violently. This emphasis on cartoonish slapstick worked well in the right context, but could become blunt and shocking when stretched too far. White was generally under pressure to finish his productions within a few days, so very often White the producer did not tone down White the director, and the outlandishly violent gags stayed in. Still, moviegoers loved these slam-bang short comedies, and Columbia produced more than 500 of them over a quarter of a century.
Favorite gags
Some of White's personal favorite gags were used again and again over the years: a comedian being arrested always protests, "I demand a cheap lawyer!" Or the star comedian accidentally collides with the villain and apologizes, "Sorry, mister, there was a man chasing me... "you're the man!" White's most familiar gag is probably the one where an actor is stuck in the posterior by a sharp object, and then yells, "Help, help! I'm losing my mind!" It did not matter whether it was the star, the ingenue, the villain, the bit players, men, women, or children: everybody did physical comedy when Jules White was directing.
White's style is most evident in his string of two-reelers starring veteran comics
Wally Vernon andEddie Quillan . Vernon and Quillan were old pros whose dancing skills made them especially agile comedians. Jules White capitalized on this by staging the kind of rough-and-tumble slapstick unseen since silent-movie days, with the stars and supporting players doing pratfalls, crossing their eyes, getting hit with messy projectiles, having barehanded fistfights, and being knocked "cuckoo" in film after film. The extreme physical comedy in these films shows Jules White in complete charge. These were pet projects for White: he kept making Vernon and Quillan shorts long after most of his other series had been discontinued.Later films
By the 1950s White was working so quickly and economically that he could film a new short comedy in a single day. His standard procedure was to borrow footage from older films, and shoot a few new scenes, often using the same actors, sets, and costumes. A "new" 15-minute comedy could contain clips from as many as three vintage comedies. Though most of White's comedies of the 1950s are almost identical to his comedies of the 1940s, White still made a few films from scratch, include his three 3-D comedies, "
Spooks! " and "Pardon My Backfire " (1953), both starring the Three Stooges, and "Down the Hatch ", starring dialect comicHarry Mimmo .In 1956, when other studios had abandoned short-subject production, Jules White had the field to himself and experimented with new ideas. Many of his Stooge comedies now consisted of all-new material, featuring science-fiction or musical themes, and often including topical references to
rock and roll and then-current feature films. White even launched a new series, "Girlie Whirls," as musical-comedy vehicles for plump comedienneMuriel Landers ; only one film was made before White reassigned Landers to one of the Stooge comedies.Retirement
Columbia closed its comedy-shorts department at the end of 1957. White dabbled in television at Columbia's
Screen Gems subsidiary in the early 1960s, working on the sitcom "Oh, Those Bells " but soon retired, saying, "Who needs such a rat race?" [ [http://theoscarsite.com/whoswho2/white_j.htm Jules White ] ]Almost 40 percent of Jules White's output stars the
Three Stooges ; the other films feature such screen favorites asBuster Keaton ,Andy Clyde ,Harry Langdon ,Hugh Herbert , Vera Vague, andEl Brendel . To date, only the Stooges and Keaton material has been released to home video.White died of
Alzheimer's Disease on April 30, 1985.Further reading
*"The White Brothers" (also known as "Behind the Three Stooges: The White Brothers") by David Bruskin, ISBN 1882766008. (Interviews with Jules White and his brothers Jack and Sam)
*"The Columbia Comedy Shorts" byTed Okuda with Edward Watz, ISBN 0786405775. (Discussion and filmography of the Columbia comedies; Jules White is quoted throughout)References
External links
* [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0925028/ Jules White - Internet Movie Database]
* [http://theoscarsite.com/whoswho2/white_j.htm Jules White - The Great Movie Shorts Biography]
* [http://www.threestooges.net/index.php?main=/crew.php&id=1 Jules White - The Three Stooges]Persondata
NAME= White, Jules
ALTERNATIVE NAMES= Weiss, Jules
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Film director
DATE OF BIRTH= 1900-9-17
PLACE OF BIRTH=Budapest ,Hungary
DATE OF DEATH= 1985-4-30
PLACE OF DEATH=Van Nuys, California ,USA
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