Robert Wise
Director
b. 1914 · USA
Wise began his career in the RKO editing department during the Great Depression, working his way up from an assistant film librarian to a full editor before Orson Welles personally selected him to cut his directorial debut.
An Orson Welles editor turned director, his career spanned West Side Story, The Sound of Music and two of science fiction's most consequential films — proof that restraint could be its own kind of spectacle. He began his career editing Welles's Citizen Kane before moving into directing, eventually winning two Best Director Academy Awards for musicals decades apart.
His two science fiction films, made over a quarter-century apart, bookend his remarkably genre-spanning career, and few directors in Hollywood history have moved as comfortably between such different registers of studio filmmaking.
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Filmography on RetroBMovies
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