If the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz feels uncannily realistic, especially for a movie released in 1939, that’s because its director had survived a similar real-life experience. That would be Galveston native King Vidor, son of a successful lumber merchant who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most successful and influential filmmakers.

Today, although it has temporarily been removed for touch-up work, one of Galveston’s famous “tree sculptures” created after Hurricane Ike–this one at his boyhood home on Winnie Street–honors Vidor’s (pronounced VEE-dor) uncredited contributions to Wizard. Victor Fleming had already directed most of the film when, in February 1939, MGM called him away to finish shooting Gone With the Wind and asked Vidor to take over. The scenes he shot were mostly the black-and-white Kansas part of the story, including Judy Garland’s singing “Over the Rainbow” and the tornado.

The latter scene took Vidor back to when he was a boy of six, when the September 1900 hurricane nearly destroyed Galveston. Decades later, he recalled the utter devastation in a 1980 oral history for the Director’s Guild of America.

“All the wooden structures of the town were flattened," he said. “The streets were piled high with dead people, and I took the first tugboat out. On the boat I went up into the bow and saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.”

Vidor went on to make nearly 70 films between 1913 and 1959. As one of the few directors to successfully bridge Hollywood’s silent and sound eras, he was equally adept at comedies, dramas, adventure films, noir, and Westerns, many of which also displayed an acute social conscience. A very short list of his notable pictures would have to include silent World War I drama The Big Parade (1925); sharp-edged showbiz satire Show People (1928); Hallelujah (1929), Hollywood’s first musical with an all-Black cast; boxing drama The Champ (1931), later remade in the 1970s; psychologically fraught Western Duel In the Sun (1946); and masterful late-career adaptations of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1949) and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1956).

Off-camera, Vidor played a key role in forming the Screen Directors Guild, later renamed the Directors Guild of America. He was also good with actors. Several were nominated for Oscars for the films they made with him, including Wallace Beery, Best Actor winner for The Champ. Other Hollywood swells who appeared in his pictures include Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Patricia Neal, and Audrey Hepburn.

In 2020, the Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, presented a major Vidor retrospective, screening 20 films plus two documentaries made toward the end of the filmmaker's life. The series was repeated two years later in the U.S. at New York’s Lincoln Center. On the Berlinale’s website, the selection committee praised Vidor’s versatility and self-possessed artistry.

“King Vidor was among the directors who thought in terms of motif, who didn’t pre-define the material, but allowed the material to define the style,” they wrote. “On top of that, he was very adventurous. He explored a broad variety of genres; some of them he pushed to the very limits and with some of them he even broke down those limits. King Vidor was a director with a very wide range, so there is a lot to be (re)discovered in his work.”

Throughout his career, Vidor was nominated five times for the Best Director Academy Award, for The Crowd; Hallelujah; The Champ; The Citadel; and War and Peace. He never won, losing to George Stevens of the Lone Star epic Giant in his final nomination. Three years before he died at age 88 in 1982, though, the Academy at last gave him an honorary Oscar. Presenting was his War and Peace star Audrey Hepburn.

“By the time the sound era arrived, he was already considered one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers,” she told the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and on worldwide television. “In all the years since then, King Vidor has reaffirmed that position many times over. His range as a filmmaker is extraordinary.”