A 20-year-old UC Santa Barbara film student is hoping to resurrect the memory of the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Director.
By FilmStew Staff, FilmStew.com
In Europe, the late filmmaker Frank Borzage remains well-known. But in the United States it's a far different story, which is why 20-year-old UC Santa Barbara student Rebecca Bozzo was compelled to make the feature-length documentary Frank Borzage, Director, which she plans to submit to Venice, Berlin and other upcoming film festivals.
"He won two [Best Director] Oscars [for 1929's Seventh Heaven and 1931's Bad Girl] and directed over 100 films, including The Mortal Storm with Jimmy Stewart and History is Made at Night with Gene Arthur," Bozzo tells Amador, CA's Ledger Dispatch newspaper. "They held a public tribute to him a couple of years ago in Europe and hundreds of people waited in line for hours to see his films."
"In the U.S., he should be as popular as Hitchcock, Stevens, Hawks or Victor Fleming," she insists. "But he's been totally lost to us. None of his films are even on DVD. As a filmmaker, I wanted to know why this happened."
Given the fact that Bozzo's father once ran a film preservation foundation, she grew up on a constant diet of films from Hollywood's Golden Age. For her documentary, Bozzo interviewed among others Borzage's widow Juanita Moss and directors such as Allison Anders and Peter Lang.
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