Delbert Mann Click picture for larger view.

Delbert Mann's modesty becomes him, but so do his enormous accomplishments as a director and Guild member. Mann is the latest to receive the prestigious DGA Honorary Life Member Award, which has been bestowed 37 times since 1938 (most recently to Motion Picture Association of America President and Chief Executive Officer Jack Valenti last year). It is given "for recognition of outstanding creative achievement, or contribution to the Guild, or the profession of Directing."

Change the "or's" in that definition to "ands," and one can easily see "why they chose" Delbert Mann. They chose him for his classic motion pictures like Marty and Separate Tables; for his huge body of work in television starting in the "golden age" of live broadcasts; and for his important leadership as the DGA's Vice President and President in the 1960s, an era which saw crucial issues being confronted in the Guild's history. Furthermore, Mann has directed nearly every top actor of his generation, and he has been revered by all of them.

When asked about his beginnings as a director, Mann mentions the name Fred Coe quite a bit. "My mentor, my teacher, the best producer who ever existed," he says passionately.

Mann befriended Coe, a theater director, while Mann was still in high school in the 1930s, and after serving in the Air Force as a B-24 pilot and Intelligence Officer during WWII, he essentially followed in Coe's footsteps.

Coe, a Yale alumnus, recommended Mann to Yale Drama School, and after graduating, Mann got his first job directing a community theater in Columbia, South Carolina — where Coe, too, had worked. Film did not even enter Mann's mind at this time, and television didn't even exist. Mann's training was strictly in terms of directing for the stage. "I learned to work with actors through theater, which is the heart of the whole thing. I'm very grateful for that. It's done me so much good in my career."

Very quickly, however, live television arrived, and sure enough, old pal Fred Coe became a TV producer, brought Mann to New York, and taught him to direct in the new medium. It was the "golden age" of television, and over the next five years Mann directed more than 100 shows with such actors as Eli Wallach, Grace Kelly, Hume Cronyn, Walter Matthau, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Newman.

One of these shows, the Paddy Chayefsky-scripted Marty, was remade by Mann as his first feature film in 1955, and the rest is history: Mann won an Academy Award (one of four the film won, including Best Picture) and a DGA Award, and for the next decade he found himself directing top stars in major features such as Separate Tables (1958), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), The Outsider (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962) and A Gathering of Eagles (1963).

He directed several performances to Oscar nominations and victories, but by the late 1960s, Mann had become dissatisfied with the features he was making and switched his focus to movies for television. He maintained this focus through his most recent production in 1994 (Lily in Winter), while continuing to make the occasional feature — notably Birch Interval (1973) and Night Crossing (1981).

While Mann looks back fondly on Marty and the features he made directly afterward, he takes greater satisfaction in some of his television work. He mentions the series of novel adaptations he made in England in the early 1970s with producer Fred Brogger — Heidi, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre and Kidnapped (released as a feature). These films gave Mann the opportunity to work with many of the best British actors of his time, including Laurence Olivier, Richard Attenborough, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson and Wendy Hiller.

"The joy of working with them was intense," recalls Mann. "Those three summers were the happiest I ever spent. Olivier was incredible. He insisted from the word go on being called 'Larry.' He was the most unpretentious, creative, helpful presence, really something special. He played the schoolmaster who tormented young David Copperfield in a kind of whispy, raspy voice. When we finished the last shot, we were walking off the set, and I asked him, 'Tell me Larry, where did you ever get that characterization?' He stopped and he laughed, and he said, 'I've been waiting all my life to do my old choirmaster!'

"The best actors I worked with were those British actors, and then those few Americans who came from the same [theater] background, like Henry Fonda and George C. Scott. They appeared on the set for the day's work with their lines learned. They never varied from the script. They knew exactly how they wanted to approach a scene. They were so well-prepared; it was just staggering. What impressed me most was with all that fixation of what they wanted to do, they were all so accessible to the director — so amenable to every suggestion."

As enjoyable as these films were, without question the project of which Mann is most proud is the 1979 Hallmark television movie All Quiet on the Western Front, which starred Richard Thomas, Ernest Borgnine, Ian Holm and Donald Pleasance. Mann had been struck with novelist Erich Maria Remarque's "poetic distancing," by which he "somehow put the reader at arm's length, so that you can read these horrors without weeping or throwing up. I was intrigued with that, and I thought, 'I've got to get the screen equivalent.' And when I look at the film today — the scope of it, the battle scenes, and the performances — I feel I got on the screen what I wanted, in the way I wanted. Because of the number and complexity of the problems going in, I'm more satisfied with the final result than anything I've ever done." The film was shot in Czechoslovakia, and though Mann and his crew were "watched like hawks," the Czech government also provided an incredulous Mann with soldiers and with actual WWI motorized vehicles off the floor of a Prague museum.

Mann's first real involvement with the Screen Directors Guild (as the DGA was then known) stemmed from an incident in 1959, when he was shooting the feature Middle of the Night in New York. In the middle of shooting, Mann recalls, he was confronted by the New York Screen Directors International Guild with demands to join up. "That was the first I ever heard of them. I don't respond happily to demands thrust upon me, and I became very incensed at their manner of handling it. When they said, 'join or else,' my reaction was, 'the hell with that.' They actually threw up a picket line around the Fox Studios on 9th or 10th Ave. and attempted to stop our production. I was confronted by an angry mob, but I just said, 'Get out of my way, I'm going in.'

"I called Joe Youngerman, who was Executive Secretary here in L.A., told him what had happened, and asked him what I should do as a good Screen Directors Guild member. He assured me that what I did was right and the Guild would back me 100%. I'm quite sure that brought me to the attention of the Board because soon after that I was elected to the Board and became, for the first time, active in Guild affairs."

Mann's background was a major appeal to the Board at the time because of the tensions between the two coasts' guilds. A New York director prominent in the West Coast guild, it was thought, would help keep things as smooth as possible. By the time Mann was elected Vice President in 1963, the East and West Coast guilds had merged to form the Directors Guild of America, but "there was still a lot of tension and distrust on both sides — fear and apprehension about what the other group was really thinking, what they were really wanting. And I attempted in every way I could to calm those fears and to present some kind of a reasonable middle ground. I felt that by the time I finished my four years as president [in 1971], the situation had eased quite a bit, and there was more trust. I felt good about that."

It was as Vice President, however, that Mann was dealt his most challenging Guild hand — the issue of possessory credits. The Writers Guild had secretly negotiated for the exclusive right to such credits, and "the DGA rose in purple fury." DGA President George Sidney was in London making a movie, which left Mann to deal with the crisis. He admits that he was at first a reluctant leader, but his superb handling of the issue directly led to his subsequent election as President. "George Stevens, Delmer Daves and John Ford got me in a corner and said, 'You've got to do it, you're the man who's gone this far with it, you can't back out now.'"

It was directors such as these, along with others like Frank Borzage, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder — heavy hitters who already had the possessory credit — who had led the charge over the issue. Mann is still impressed over their refusal to compromise. "They said, 'We're talking about future directors who haven't even started yet. They must have the right to negotiate for that credit.' They were the backbone of the guild response to the attack on the credit by the Writers Guild."

		Delbert Mann at DGA Awards Photo by Elisa Haber

Gradually, that changed and Mann renewed his close involvement when former ex-Guild Presidents were called on to attend all Board meetings and Council meetings, though they don't have a vote.

"That brought me back into contact with the problems of the Guild. I was a bit amazed by how many new problems there are with new technologies and new ways of doing things," Mann said. "But I was more stunned by how many problems that I thought we had resolved 30 years ago were still sitting right there, causing a lot of furor! The Guild has been in good hands. Jack Shea and Jay Roth have been wonderful. We are so fortunate in the administrations that we have had in recent years."

Mann has also published his memoir, Looking Back... at Live Television and Other Matters, but mostly he is itching to direct again. "After my last film, I felt wrung out. I didn't have the energy or drive to face a new picture, which partly came from the fact that my wife was dying of Alzheimer's. But I feel good about working again now, although I don't feel good about the ageism that surrounds everything.

I'm not a hot young director who will appeal to today's youthful audience. But I'm a better director now than I ever was."

Table of Contents     Top of Page