Directors Guild honors Delbert Mann

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- The Directors Guild of America has announced that Oscar-winning director Delbert Mann will be honored with the guild's Honorary Life Member Award at the upcoming DGA Awards on March 9.

Mann is one of a handful of people who won the best director Oscar for their first features. He won for "Marty" -- which also won for best picture, actor (Ernest Borgnine) and screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky) in 1955. He also won the DGA Award for "Marty."

The life member award is given to recognize "outstanding creative achievement, or contribution to the DGA or the profession of directing." Pervious recipients include D.W. Griffith, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Elia Kazan, David Lean, Louis B. Mayer, Jack L. Warner and Robert Wise.

"Del Mann's awe-inspiring work over the course of nearly 50 years and his leadership at the DGA has earned him the Award that honors his contribution to the Guild and to the profession of directing," said DGA President Jack Shea, who began his own career working as a stage manager for Mann.

Delbert Mann received an M.F.A. in directing from Yale School of Drama. He worked as a director at the Town Theatre in Columbia, S.C. and stage manager and instructor at the Wellesley Summer Theater and School.

After working as an assistant director for NBC in New York, Mann broke into TV directing in 1949 and became a prolific contributor to the so-called "golden age" of TV drama. He directed more than 100 live dramas for "The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse" and went on to direct productions for "Playhouse 90," "Omnibus," "Producers Showcase," "Ford Star Jubilee" and "The DuPont Show of the Month."

He directed Doris Day in the romantic comedy movie hits, "That Touch of Mink" (1962) with Cary Grant, and "Lover Come Back" (1961) with Rock Hudson. He also directed Tony Curtis in "The Outsider" (1961) as Ira Hamilton Hayes, the Pima Indian who was one of the U.S. Marines who raised the American flag at Iwo Jima.

Mann was the director of the TV movie "Heidi" -- famous in TV history as the program that NBC brass decided was more important than the final minutes of the match-up between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders on Nov. 17, 1968.

The network cut away from the game in order to start the movie on time. While NBC was showing the opening minutes of "Heidi," football fans missed seeing the Raiders score two touchdowns within nine seconds for a come-from-behind, 43-32, victory.

The game -- forever known as "The Heidi Game" -- finished 10th in an NFL poll in which fans ranked the most memorable NFL games of the 20th century. It was voted the most memorable regular-season game in NFL history in a 1997 poll of football writers.

It also gave Mann one of his five DGA nominations for TV movie direction. The other nominations came for "David Copperfield" (1960), "Jane Eyre" (1971), "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1979) and "The Member of the Wedding" (1982).

"All Quiet on the Western Front" won a Golden Globe for best TV movie. "Jane Eyre," "The Man Without a Country" (1973), "The Ted Kennedy Jr. Story" (1986) and "Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore" (1992) received Christopher Awards.

Mann received a DGA feature nomination for "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1960).

He was elected to the DGA's national board of directors in 1958 and served as president of the guild from 1967-1971. In 1997, Mann received the DGA's Robert B. Aldrich Award for extraordinary service to the guild.

The 82-year-old Mann currently serves as a member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, the Directors Guild Foundation and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.