page_title: Stanley Donen
section_title: 1949–1952: MGM contract director
hierarchical_section_title: Stanley Donen / Film career / 1949–1952: MGM contract director
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a movie screenshot from the film Royal Wedding. It illustrates Fred Astaire performing a song and dance routine to "You&#39;re All the World to Me" composed by Burton Lane (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics). To film the scene, the room and camera were constructed as a rotatable unit, and furniture was fixed in place.[1]
context_page_description: Stanley Donen was an American film director and choreographer whose most celebrated works are On the Town and Singin' in the Rain, both of which starred Gene Kelly who co-directed. His other films include Royal Wedding, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, Indiscreet, and Charade. He began his career in the chorus line on Broadway for director George Abbott, where he befriended Kelly. From 1943, he was in Hollywood and worked as a choreographer before beginning to collaborate with Kelly. After On the Town, Donen worked as a contract director for MGM under producer Arthur Freed producing critically well-received box-office hits. Donen and Kelly co-directed the musical Singin' in the Rain, released in April 1952, which has appeared on lists of the best films ever made. Donen's relationship with Kelly deteriorated during their final collaboration, It's Always Fair Weather. He then broke his contract with MGM to become an independent producer in 1957. He continued making films throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, often financial successes that gained positive attention.
context_section_description: After the success of On the Town, Donen signed a seven-year contract with MGM as a director. His next two films were for Freed, but without Kelly. After being replaced as director on Pagan Love Song over personal differences with star Esther Williams, Donen was given the chance to direct his boyhood idol Fred Astaire.
  Royal Wedding (1951) starred Astaire and Jane Powell as a brother-sister American dancing team performing in England during the royal wedding of Elizabeth and Philip in 1947. Judy Garland was originally cast in the lead role, but was fired for absenteeism due to illness and replaced by Powell. In the film, Powell's love affair with a wealthy Englishman (Peter Lawford) threatens to ruin the brother-sister act, while Astaire finds his own romance with another dancer (Sarah Churchill). The film is loosely based on Astaire's real-life career with his sister and early dancing partner, Adele Astaire, who retired after marrying an English lord in 1932 and includes one of Astaire's best remembered dance sequences, the "You're All the World to Me" number where he appears to defy gravity by dancing first on the walls and then on the ceiling. The shot was achieved by building the set inside a steel-reinforced rotating cylindrical chamber, with the camera attached to the cylinder. Both Astaire and the film's lyricist Alan Jay Lerner claimed that they thought of the idea. The film included music by Lerner and Burton Lane and was released in 1950.
  Next, Donen made Love Is Better Than Ever, which was not released until March 1952. The film stars Larry Parks as a streetwise show business agent who is compelled to marry an innocent young dance teacher (Elizabeth Taylor). Donen and Kelly appear in cameo roles. The reason for the release being delayed for over a year was Parks's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his eventual admission of former membership of the Communist Party and his naming of others. The film was unsuccessful at the box-office.
caption: Fred Astaire dances on the walls and ceiling in Royal Wedding, a special effect using a rotating reinforced-steel cylindrical chamber in which to film.
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