Arthur Jacobson


Arthur Jacobson was an American assistant director, thinker and writer about culture. While he was an assistant director for most of his films, he was the main director for the 1935 film Home on the Range.
He was nominated at the 6th Academy Awards for the now defunct category of Best Assistant Director.

Early life

As a teenager in New York City, he cleaned lights at Biograph Studios and carted flammable nitrate prints to midtown theaters.

Career

He followed silent actress Clara Bow out to Hollywood, where he began as a cameraman,
In 1929, he was part of the transition to talking scenes in Chinatown Nights, assisting director William Wellman. He had a "gift for on-the-fly problem solving" like in The Royal Family of Broadway where he used a grain forklift to shoot Fredric March running up a staircase. in a 1980 DGA oral history interview, Jacobson said to assist George Seaton in 1947 on Miracle on 34th Street was one of the highlights of his career.
Jacobson surmised that America, at the end of the nineteenth century, "was going to face a crisis for the arts, the sciences, and culture, because there wouldn’t be geniuses anymore the way there had been in the time of tuberculosis."
He was active in the Directors Guild of America. starting in 1937, and three decades later served on its National Board.

Selected filmography