A few months ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sloan De Forest about her newest book The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema’s Most Influential Filmmakers. It was supposed to be for my Reel Travels podcast, but life got in the way and I did not get it up in time before I took a hiatus. I’m posting it here as a Q&A because Sloan’s book, especially if you’re a film buff, is fantastic and our interview was fun! Essential Directors would make a great read for you or a great gift for a friend who loves movies just as much!
Lisa: Hi Sloan, your book, Essential Directors, is super cool! It’s not exactly film or tv travel-related, but there are so many places you can go to see some of the work and learn about the lives of these directors that you profiled, so it does really kind of tie in. How did you get started in writing this book? Did Turner Classic Movies (TCM) approach you or did you approach them?
Sloan: They approached me. Turner Classic Movies has done some really nice books on film over the past several years. I was fortunate enough to work with them on Must-See Sci-Fi: 50 Movies That Are Out of This World, which was my first book, released in 2018. I got offered a second book, Dynamic Dames 50 Leading Ladies Who Made History (2019). Then they came to me and said we want someone to write a book about directors. That’s something TCM has wanted to do since they first started printing these books. And I said, me, me, me, me, me! It’s just a fascinating area that I knew quite a bit about, but it was also an opportunity for me to learn as well.
Lisa: How does one become a film historian?
Sloan: I didn’t set out to become a film historian. I just always loved movies. That started when I was about four or five and my mom took me to see The Muppet Movie and I just fell in love with the movies. I never thought that that’s what I would be doing professionally and it’s been amazing to get to ride that journey. I started getting more and more into the classics as I got into my teens and 20s, and then Turner Classic Movies came along, which was a godsend for those of us who are studying film and that opened my eyes to a lot of the films of the 20s and 30s, going way back to the silent era.
I was an actress and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and writing. In 2008, I worked for the Mary Pickford Foundation. For those who don’t know, Mary Pickford was the first major movie star. She defined movie stardom, but she was also a producer and writer and was a very powerful woman in the industry. That was a great experience as well. Somehow, I ended up writing about films and having enough knowledge about the classic era that someone decided I was a film historian.
Lisa: On your website, you have a link to 3400 movies that you’ve watched. How did you compile this?
Sloan: I have a friend who’s an actor and he is also a math whiz. He remembers every movie he’s ever seen. He remembers the date he saw it. He can tell you I saw LA Confidential on November 3, 1997, or whatever he remembers. On his website, he had all the movies he had seen listed and the dates that he saw them and that’s what inspired me.
Lisa: What’s your favorite movie?
Sloan: My standard answer is usually Sunset Boulevard, but it depends on what mood I’m in, etc. But Sunset Boulevard is one I can always stand by. It has everything. It’s dark. It’s film noir, but it’s also very funny. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It’s got romance, drama, laughs, and tears, and it’s about Hollywood, which is always something that has fascinated me. That’s where my obsession lies.
Lisa: You have 56 directors in the book. What went into deciding who made it and who didn’t?
Sloan: My original list started out at probably 100. Then we whittled it down with the help of TCM. For example, Sergei Eisenstein was so important to the development of the art form of filmmaking but we cut him. He was the master of montage but if you look at the cover of the book, you see Cecil B DeMille and Steven Spielberg and Billy Wilder and Sergei Eisenstein are not really in that league as far as being that famous so we felt we could lose that one.
I had to lose Busby Berkeley. I really like his films, but he’s more known as a pioneering choreographer than necessarily a director, but he’s mentioned in the book. We condensed some directors, like Ingmar Bergman, and Fellini into small little blurbs, and that hurt. But I think it made the book stronger. Now, it really has a focus on Hollywood, but without being blind to international influences.
Lisa: So it was a book by committee, right?
Sloan: That’s the way all the books are with TCM because they put their brand name on them. They have a presence, but they’re never demanding. A lot of people don’t realize that an author doesn’t decide, for example, the page count, but if it were up to me the book would be 500 pages and it would have everyone in it.
Lisa: How long did this book take you to put together? Was there something surprising that you learned about any of the directors that maybe you didn’t know before you started?
Sloan: This book took longer than any of my other books. Covid-19 impacted the materials that I could get. I depend a lot on the public library, Netflix discs, and The Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy had a great storehouse of film. I couldn’t get to any of those places and I just couldn’t get the Netflix movies on time. It presented a big obstacle and dragged the whole process out.
As far as things that surprised me, (one of them was) Dorothy Archer. I knew about but I hadn’t done a really deep dive. She was incredible starting out as a typist and she worked her way up to director.
Lisa: Did you sit and watch some of the movies before you wrote about them?
Sloan: Absolutely. I immersed myself in these movies and in books and reading about directors in old magazine articles. But at the end of the day, it’s really about watching the films, because unless I can watch them myself and interpret what I’m seeing, I can’t write about these directors, because I would just be rehashing what the Wikipedia page. I have to get that firsthand experience of watching their films to really understand what they were doing.
Lisa: This would be fun but I would get caught up in watching all of the movies.
Sloan: That’s pretty much what happened. It was a challenge because we were short on time, and there are so many directors to cover. Each director could have 70 films on their resume, so there’s no way I can have time to watch all so I had to pick and choose.
Lisa: Your book, which is so beautifully laid out, is fun to see where Hollywood came from. Was it your intent to introduce an audience to directors that maybe they didn’t know? And what about kids knowing all of these directors and what effect that they had on movies?
Sloan: I can’t stress enough how important I think it is for people to understand the context of the past and the early days of filmmaking. Everything we watch today — whether it’s streaming content, a TV series or a movie — is based on innovations by the directors in this book. It’s important for people to know when the movie camera was invented, it was a long, difficult process to shape and create this art form that we now just take for granted.
All the basic filmmaking techniques were developed by Fritz Lang, and F.W. Murnau. And, the silent filmmakers, Erich von Stroheim, the people in this book, laid the foundation for all of the films and entertainment that we see today. And I think, where would we be without them?
Lisa: But women aren’t a huge force in this book.
Sloan: Yes, unfortunately, there just were not a lot of women directors in the industry, and there isn’t today. It’s always been seen as a man’s game. But well, I shouldn’t say always, it’s actually there were quite a few women directors in the very early days of Hollywood that didn’t make it in the book, because they’re just not that well known. Or, you know, their output was not that highly regarded today, or many of their films are lost, unfortunately. But there were quite a few women directors in the early days, and then it became seen as that’s a man’s job. Unfortunately, we’re still suffering from that today.
But there are women who played a much more integral role than people realize. Just because there are only a few scattered women in the book doesn’t mean that women didn’t exercise control over the direction of cinema. There were women who were big stars, like Hedy Lamarr, who became their own producers. There were women such as I mentioned, Mary Pickford, who was essentially directing her film. She would hire her buddy, Marshall Nealon, who was a fun guy, not without talent, but he was an alcoholic, and he would often not show up to the set or would show up drunk. She would essentially take the reins and direct. She directed or semi-directed many of her films without credit. So there was a lot of influence by women in the industry that I think was invisible.
Lisa: At least today in the indie market, we have more opportunities to get movies seen out there and directed out there by women. Do you agree?
Sloan: Yes, we do. And television is where a lot of the creatives are going because the film industry is in such a state of flux. There is changing for the better.
Lisa: This website is focused on film and TV travel. I’m curious if you’ve ever done a vacation or a trip that was based on a movie or TV show. Maybe you have to see where they filmed it or go to a particular movie/tv museum, or somebody’s famous house or anything like that.
Sloan: I absolutely have. I love doing that. I love going to see famous locations. I did go up to San Francisco a few years back and tried to see as many Vertigo locations as I could. I even put together a day trip of all the locations in Double Indemnity. And so many others.
Lisa: In San Francisco, there are Alfred Hitchcock walking tours. In New York, there’s a museum dedicated to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and they have some of his memorabilia. At the Smithsonian, you can see Victor Fleming’s work, and there is the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. There are so many places that aren’t just about where the actor stood for film, but it’s about thehow director made this or how the director made that. Sloan, I love this book. It really gives the respect to directors in the industry, so I’m so excited that this book came out. Because I think it really gives the proper attention and respect to people in the industry so congratulations to you.
Sloan: Well, thanks, Lisa.
You can find Sloan’s website here.
