MUMBAI: The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to producer-director Francis Ford Coppola at the Academy‘s 2nd Annual Governors Awards dinner on 13 November at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center.
Honorary Awards would be given to historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Eli Wallach. “Each of these honorees has touched movie audiences worldwide and influenced the motion picture industry through their work,” said Academy President Tom Sherak.
Coppola began his film career in the early 1960s making low-budget films with 2009 Honorary Award recipient Roger Corman. By the end of the 1970s he had won two Oscars for writing and directing The Godfather Part II and the other three for writing for Patton, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II. Among Copolla‘s numerous producing credits are American Graffiti,Gardens of Stone, Bram Stoker‘s Dracula,Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, Jack and Tetro.
In 1969, he established American Zoetrope, an independent film studio that helped launch the careers of George Lucas and Carroll Ballard, and has since produced more than 30 films, including The Black Stallion,The Outsiders Lost in Translation and The Good Shepherd.
Brownlow is widely regarded as the preeminent historian of the silent film era as well as a preservationist. Among his many silent film restoration projects are Abel Gance‘s 1927 epic Napoleon, Rex Ingram‘s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Thief of Bagdad starring Douglas Fairbanks. Brownlow has authored, among others, The Parade‘s Gone By; The War, the West, and the Wilderness; Hollywood: The Pioneers; Behind the Mask of Innocence; David Lean; and Mary Pickford Rediscovered.
A key figure in the French New Wave movement, Godard started out writing about cinema before beginning to make his own short films. His influential first feature, Breathless, impressed audiences and filmmakers alike with its jazzy take on the American crime film. For fifty years, Godard has continued to write and direct challenging, and sometimes controversial, films that have established his reputation as one of the seminal modernists in the history of cinema. His more than 70 features include Contempt, Alphaville, Weekend and King Lear.
Born in Brooklyn in 1915, Wallach made his debut film appearance in Elia Kazan‘s 1956 feature Baby Doll starring alongside Karl Malden and Carroll Baker. Since then he has starred in more than 50 features including The Magnificent Seven, The Misfits, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,The Godfather, Part III and The Holiday.
The Honorary Award, an Oscar statuette, is given to an individual for “extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences, or for outstanding service to the Academy.”