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Robert B. Aldrich Award
Tom Donovan
Tom Donovan's devotion to the Directors Guild of America as one of its East Coast stalwarts earned him an Honorary Life Membership in 1985. By then he had served as first or national vice president to five Guild presidents. Now, a year after he marked a half century in organizations representing directors, Donovan is being honored with a Guild award that bears the namesake of one of those presidents.
He is the second of two people recognized with the Robert B. Aldrich Award given to recognize extraordinary Guild service to the Guild and its members. Robert Butler is the other Aldrich recipient (see related story). Donovan was first vice president of the Guild from 1967 to 1981, serving with Delbert Mann from 1967 to 1971, Robert Wise from 1971 to 1975, Aldrich from 1975 to 1979 and George Schaefer from 1979 to 1981.
Donovan was also national vice president from 1983 to 1987 in the administration of then President Gilbert Cates. He began as a DGA Board member in 1960, when the West Coast- and film industry-based Screen Directors Guild (SDG) merged with the primarily New York-based Radio and Television Directors Guild (RTDG) to form the DGA. He had been a two-term president of the RTDG and joined it in 1950 when he became a stage manager for CBS.
"Of course I'm very honored by this award," Donovan said. "I loved Robert Aldrich. He was a tough guy, a tough president, and he did a lot for the Guild. But I loved them all and was proud to serve with Delbert Mann, Bobby Wise, George Schaefer and Gil Cates - I have great admiration for Gil. We accomplished quite a bit and had a lot of forward movement with Gil as president.
"The Guild took up the same percentage of my time as my working career," Donovan said. He directed installments of such live shows as Playhouse 90, The United States Steel Hour, The DuPont Show of the Month, Danger and various drama specials produced by David Susskind in the 1950s and 1960s, including The Bells of St. Mary's with Claudette Colbert and Robert Preston. On the final installment of U.S. Steel in 1963, he directed Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Robert Anderson's The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. Also on U.S. Steel, Donovan directed Helen Hayes and Patty Duke in One Red Rose for Christmas in 1958 and Tallulah Bankhead in A Man for Oona in 1962.
The New York-based Donovan also was director and/or director/producer of such daytime shows as General Hospital, A World Apart, Another World, Our Private World, Love of Life and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.
"I was always pleased of my service on the National Board of the Guild," Donovan said. "That's the rule-making body in the Guild and very vital to the organization of the Guild as a whole. Nothing can be done without the National Board's approval. It was that part of the Guild that worked to keep the Guild together."
During the negotiations to merge the SDG with the RTDG to form the DGA in 1960, Donovan was a central figure as RTDG's top man. He served three terms as RTDG president from 1954 to 1960.
"The film directors saw that us TV guys were going to make a big dent in their business," Donovan said. "They really wanted to get together with us to represent all directors. We had such active members in the east then as the current President, Jack Shea, as well as John Rich and Mike King. And here these big Hollywood legends - Frank Capra, George Sidney, George Stevens - were courting us.
"These were big names in the business and it made us quite proud to be in their midst. At that time I was directing dramas, and after the merger we all worked hard to get all directors in the union, whether they were directing features, television, documentaries. The watchwords were 'A director is a director is a director.' Many directors were moving back and forth between television and features.
"This was the time, the late 1950s and early 1960s, when television was generating a lot of successful new motion picture directors, people like John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Delbert Mann, Dan Petrie, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, Frank Schaffner and Sidney Lumet," remembered Donovan. "There were some differences of opinion on both sides - people who thought that it wasn't in the best interests of either side to join the other. Some ventured persuasive ideas. But we went ahead and merged, and as mergers go, it was pretty smooth."
Donovan takes pride in Guild negotiations through the years. "It was all fun," he said, "even the long nights of negotiations. I can't go into all the details - things we don't bring up again - but the Guild Board always took pride in negotiating strongly without closing down New York or Hollywood. We did have that strike under Gil Cates that lasted a few hours on the East Coast and a few minutes on the West Coast, avoiding a work stoppage. Of course, we were thinking of not only ourselves, but also of the thousands and thousands of others we would put out of work by closing down the entertainment business."
Of the leaps in Guild policy, Donovan points to the adoption of the Guild's Low Budget Agreement with the producers as "a real breakthrough."
"The Guild covers many, many more productions, particularly independent pictures with it," said Donovan, whose one film is Tristan and Isolde (1979) aka Lovespell, starring Richard Burton, Kate Mulgrew and Cyril Cusack. "In the old days, there was one contract for film and that was it. Now, we can cover the indies."
Donovan credits the forward-thinking Guild administration for keeping its membership up-to-date and in front of other industry unions.
"The Guild is growing by leaps and bounds into the future," he said. The negotiations for cable and internet contracts are keeping up with the times and really covering all of these fantastic changes that we are seeing in the new technologies that are going to generally affect all of the arts, crafts and guilds. The Guild leadership is keeping track. I think Jay D. Roth does a fantastic job as National Executive Director. I'm a big fan of his as I am of [National Vice President] Ed Sherin and Jack Shea."
It was Sherin who asked Donovan to chair the Special Projects Committee in the East for several years. The latter also serves on the DGA-PAC helping to create a more powerful voice for Guild members in Washington, D.C., and is a Trustee of the DGA Foundation. Outside of the Guild, he is also a Trustee of the Actors Fund of America.
Past recipients of the Robert B. Aldrich Award include Robert E. Wise, Elliot Silverstein, George Sidney, Sheldon Leonard, Gilbert Cates, George L. Schaefer, Larry Auerbach, Milt Felsen, Jack Shea, Gene Reynolds, John Rich, Burt Bluestein, Max A. Schindler, Daniel Petrie, Delbert Mann, Martha Coolidge and Arthur Hiller.
-Jerry Roberts
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