THE HINDENBURG DISASTER

(May 6, 1937 – Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey)

Robert Wise

(Director, The Hindenburg, 1975)

The Official Story

ROBERT WISE
(Director, The Hindenburg, 1975)

Robert Earl Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was an American film director, producer, and editor. He won the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for his musical films West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and directed and produced The Sand Pebbles (1966), which was nominated for Best Picture.

Among his other films are The Body Snatcher (1945), Born to Kill (1947), The Set-Up (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Destination Gobi (1953), This Could Be The Night (1957), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), I Want to Live! (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Hindenburg (1975) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

He was the president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1985 through 1988.

Wise achieved critical success as a director in a striking variety of film genres: horror, noir, western, war, science fiction, musical and drama, with many repeat successes within each genre. Wise’s meticulous preparation may have been largely motivated by studio budget constraints, but advanced the moviemaking art. Robert Wise received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.

Director and producer

In the 1970s, Wise directed such films as The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Hindenburg (1975), the horror film Audrey Rose (1977) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), the first Star Trek feature film.

Wise’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s science-fiction thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1971), an anti-biological warfare film, was a “modest critical hit.” His next film, Two People (1973), starring Peter Fonda and Lindsay Wagner, got “poor reviews” and is “one of Wise’s least-seen movies.” The Hindenburg (1975), which profiles the 1937 crash of the eponymous airship, was panned by critics, although it won Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound Effects. Wise’s Audrey Rose (1977), a reincarnation thriller, received mixed reviews and was “sometimes criticized for being an Exorcist (1973) knockoff.”

Source: Wikipedia