Film director, film producer, screenwriter
Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 283-291. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich s "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich , George Cukor , Allan Dwan , Howard Hawks , Alfred Hitchcock , Chuck Jones , Fritz Lang , Joseph H. Lewis , Sidney Lumet , Leo McCarey , Otto Preminger , Don Siegel , Josef von Sternberg , Frank Tashlin , Edgar G. Ulmer , Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
According to Kevin Brownlow s "The Parades Gone By", Dwan thought hed directed over 1400 films, including one-reelers, between his arrival in the industry (circa 1909) and his final film in 1961.
Interviewed in "Talking to the Piano Player: Silent Film Stars, Writers and Directors Remember" by Stuart Oderman.
Founder of Allan Dwan Productions, a film production company active from 1919-1921.
Co-founder of Associated Producers, Inc., 1919.
President of Dwan Film Corp., formed in 1922.
His extraordinarily long career lasted from 1911-61. During that time he worked under contract at the following studios: Universal (1913-14), Paramount (1917-18, 1923-26), Fox (1926-27, 1929, 1931-32, 1935-40, 1957), United Artists (1944-45), Republic (1949-54) and RKO (1954-55).
Graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in engineering.
He was Gloria Swanson s favorite director. After he began to work for Triangle in 1916, he also won the respect of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford , who were, at that time, the most powerful couple in the film business.
It was Dwan, rather than D.W. Griffith , who devised the famous crane shot used in Intolerance: Loves Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) . He also pioneered the dolly shot in 1915.
He worked for an illumination company in Chicago, installing Cooper-Hewitt lamps at the Chicago Post Office, opposite the Essanay film studio. Essanay exec George K. Spoor thought the lights could prove useful in movie photography and contracted Dwan to design a bank of lights. Dwan soon graduated to scenario editor. His first directing assignment arrived almost by accident: he was "pressed into service" by the American Film Co. when one of its directors went AWOL on an alcoholic binge.
Dwan is buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, CA, Section F, Tier 18, Grave 62. He had once used the mission grounds as a location for his silent feature Tide of Empire . Just as he was fond of opening his films with a poem after the main credits, Dwan wrote the epitaph on his grave marker in verse: "Look Down, Oh Lord, and bless me with thy grace / And make me worthy of thy sacrifice / And after death to look upon thy face / And earn, perhaps, a place in paradise".
If you get your head up above the mob, they try to knock it off. If you,stay down, you last forever.
