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George Cooper Stevens is an unassuming, long-jawed, rugged roughneck with an innate intelligence (uninfluenced by formal education), an extreme sensitivity and a fine flow of good humor. He was raised in show business. His father, Landers Stevens, oldtime Shakespearean actor, was proprietor of a popular Pacific Coast stock company.
When Stevens went to Hollywood at 17 (1921), he had carried many a spear in his father's dramas, had stopped school after a year in high school, failed to make the grade at shortstop with the Oakland Acorns baseball team. Over his father's bitter remonstrances ("A cameraman's no better than a lousy stagehand"), he became the youngest and one of the best cameramen in motion pictures.
Like many another successful director (Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, William Wyler, etc.), Stevens learned his cinema technique on the roughhouse, two-reel comedy lots, where everyone from prop boy to producer had a hand in the story and no one knew how it was going to end. That is known as "shooting off the cuff," and Stevens does just that today with most of his pictures.
His comedy foundation was solid after he had worked as cameraman on 60 or more Laurel & Hardy and Harry Langdon shorts. One of thorn had an unforgettable sequence: Laurel & Hardy delivering a piano up an impossibly long, steep set of narrow outdoor steps. Says Stevens: "The first theater audience that saw it cheered so hard at the finish that the house had to run the two-reeler over again before the customers would look at the feature."
Hal Roach made Stevens a director (of shorts) in 1929. The 25-year-old cameraman was more than ready. An incident at Universal studios had revealed his true ambitions. The studio sent him upcountry to take some fast-action cattle shots for a Western. It was apple-blossom time and —to a man with an itch to direct—irresistible. When the studio ran the film, it was charmingly interspersed with tender shots of dropping apple blossoms. They almost ran him off the lot.
As the maker of pictures such as Penny Serenade, Vivacious Lady, Annie Oakley, Gunga Din, one of the best Astaire-Rogers musicals (Swing Time), Director Stevens has exhibited a versatile talent, a wide range. He has never consciously tried to make a "great picture." But Columbia, which has him under one of Hollywood's favored producer-director contracts, is betting that he will. At 37 he is one of the youngest good directors in the business.
Actors like to work for him. His air of knowing what he is about puts them at ease; his ability to convey to them precisely what he wants reassures them; his enjoyment of what he is doing stimulates them. But two of Stevens' attributes are beyond the understanding of actors or anyone else. One is his capacity for putting anyone on the defensive at once by tightening his lips, removing all expression from his face and refusing to utter a word. Known to his friends as "the chill," it has been triumphantly successful at making studio executives behave.