Mark Sandrich

MINI BIO:

Mark Sandrich was a pipe-smoking director of comedies and musicals who worked out his pictures in fine detail and made all of the best Astaire-Rogers musicals of the 1930s. A man with an inventive and agile mind, Sandrich had trained as a physicist. At 22, he visited the set of a film being made by his glamorous cousin, Carmel Myers, solved a minor electrical problem there and found himself offered a job as electrics expert and assistant prop-man. Sandrich's warmly extroverted personalty adapted itself naturally to the film world and, by 1926, he was directing two-reeler shorts. After making a couple of features, Sandrich joined RKO in 1930.

Then came the opportunity to direct Fred Astaire's and Ginger Roger's first starring film, The Gay Divorcee. Sandrich became part of a hard-working, hard-thinking team that included Astaire, dance directors Hermes Pan and Dave Gould, cameraman David Abel, art director Carroll Clark and writer Dwight Taylor. It was Sandrich's idea that the musical numbers should flow from dialogue just as Astaire and Rogers flowed as a dance team, and he advanced the 'playback' (filming action, songs and dances to a pre-recored soundtrack) to help his players concentrate on the job in hand.

After a row over the penny pinching on Carefree, Sandrich left RKO and set up his own unit at Paramount, where he later reunited again with Astaire for the film Holiday Inn.