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60 dga quarterly "George brought all the influence to bear that he possibly could to … in fact, defend the Constitution of the United States," said Huston. Stevens' triumph didn't end the blacklist, or loyalty oaths, but it rein- vigorated the Guild so that power was in the hands of its membership, and it assured that the political agendas of individual members would no longer guide its actions. The focus returned to protecting directors' creative and economic freedom. "I drove 50 miles up the coast to Ventura and back that night, I was so exhilarated by our victory," Stevens would later say. George Jr., who was 18 at the time of the meeting, uses this mo- ment in Guild history to make a witty pivot in A Filmmaker's Jour- ney. The film cuts straight from the showdown at the Guild to the climactic gun battle in Stevens' next film, Shane (1953). This realistic yet mythic Western—its jarring pistol shots mixed for maximum vol- ume—affirmed American heroism as it called into question our too- comfortable attitudes toward violence. What his father saw during the war marked him forever, George Jr. said. "You take a sensitive man who thinks about life, like my fa- ther, and naturally he would come away deeply affected." Clips from the reels of wartime color footage that Stevens shot form the most startling and unforgettable sequence in A Filmmaker's Journey, fea- turing the D-Day landings, where he was one of the first ashore; the liberation of Paris; the snowy ruins of bombed-out villages en route to the Battle of the Bulge; and, most unforgettably, the liberation of the death camp at Dachau. And yet, "We have to be careful not to over- simplify," stressed George Jr. "Dad came back from the war with his sense of humor very much intact. He was by no means gloomy—but had a different sense of his responsibilities." Stevens worked hard to instill these values in his son, bringing him aboard his postwar projects. Although Paramount owned Jack Schaefer's 1949 novel Shane and offered it to Stevens to direct, it was George Jr. who talked him into accepting the assignment. Fresh out of high school, he'd been helping his dad prep A Place in the Sun (1951), "breaking down Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Trag- edy," when he devoured Shane in an afternoon and urged his father to read it. "Why don't you tell me the story," Stevens replied. George Jr. joined the Guild as an assistant director not long there- after. He worked closely with his father not only on A Place in the Sun and Shane, but also on Giant (1956). After two years in the Air Force making training films, he directed episodic television (Peter Gunn, Alfred Hitchcock Presents) until newsman Edward R. Murrow invited him to Washington as part of the Kennedy administration to take a leading role at the U.S. Information Agency. "The family joke," Michael Stevens said in a 2013 interview, "is that my father moved to Washington in 1961 to get away from Hollywood." George Jr. resists this characterization: "I never left the movies." At the USIA, "We made 300 documentaries a year." Foremost among these was John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums (1965), recently restored and still watched half a century later. "The Amer- ican Film Institute came along after that. I thought it would need three years, and it took 12—but the creative life was always going to be my life." In addition to founding AFI and launching the Kennedy Center Honors, George Jr. distinguished himself as a director with A Filmmaker's Journey; George Stevens: From D-Day to Berlin (1994)— another documentary that used more of his father's wartime foot- age—and a made-for-television movie, Separate but Equal (1991), starring Sidney Poitier as Thurgood Marshall in a dramatization of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended school segregation. He was also a producer on Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998). For Michael (middle name Murrow, after Edward R.), the legacy PHOTOS: DGA ARCHIVES; (OPPOSITE) GETTY IMAGES " We were each raised with the belief that fine films were the result of one individual's point of view and control. That was the guiding principle of Dad's life. " —GEORGE STEVENS JR. GUILD BUSINESS: President George Stevens at his desk for a board meeting in 1949, with many of the players who would figure in the blacklist meeting the following year.