George Stevens Jr.
He is the founder of the American Film Institute, creator of the AFI Life Achievement Award, and co-creator of the Kennedy Center Honors.
[8][7] In 1962, while he was doing pre-production work on The Greatest Story Ever Told, Stevens was recruited by Edward R. Murrow to serve as director of the Motion Picture and Television Service, a division of the United States Information Agency.
[10][11] At age 31, Stevens moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where as director of the service, he produced roughly 300 short documentary films per year.
[17] In June 1967, at age 35, Stevens resigned from his position at the USIA to join the American Film Institute, which was created using NEA funds, as its founding director.
[18][5] Stevens initially ran the AFI out of a suite in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and in his first days on the job began reaching out to American universities with film programs to see how the institute could best aid their efforts to develop the talents of young filmmakers and preserve archival copies of important films.
[20][18] Over the course of Stevens's tenure as founding director of the AFI, this developmental wing of the institute produced notable writer-directors such as Paul Schrader, David Lynch, and Terrence Malick.
[21][22] Stevens also helped raise funds that financed independent film projects like Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A. and Robert Kramer's Ice.
[21][23] In 1973, Stevens established the AFI Life Achievement Award, to honor and recognize decorated figures in the American film industry such as Orson Welles, James Cagney, Bette Davis, and Lillian Gish.
[1] In 1978, along with Nick Vanoff, Stevens co-created the Kennedy Center Honors, a ceremony and television production recognizing people who have made significant contributions to American culture through the performing arts, such as Meryl Streep, Stephen Sondheim, and Jessye Norman.
The documentary, titled George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey was first shown in the summer of 1984 at the Deauville American Film Festival, and was released commercially in the US in April 1985.
[35] The Academy concluded that the two films "shared some production elements", and due to that, Stevens' documentary was ineligible to have been entered to the awards.
[35][37] Stevens wrote and directed the 1991 television movie Separate but Equal, starring Sidney Poitier as Thurgood Marshall.
[38][39] The movie, which aired over two nights on ABC, depicts Marshall and a team of NAACP staffers arguing and winning the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in the United States Supreme Court.
