Conrad A. Nervig

Conrad Nervig had the distinction of being the first-ever recipient of an Academy Award for best editing. This was for Eskimo (1933), a drama shot in semi-documentary style by outdoor and action specialist W.S. Van Dyke in the northernmost inhabited settlement in Alaska. The entire dialogue was in an Inuit language and subtitles were used in translation. The South Dakota-born Nervig had started in the industry with Goldwyn Pictures in 1922 and remained after the merger with Metro, spending his entire career at MGM until his retirement in 1954. He worked on many classic films across diverse genres, including A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Maytime (1937), The Big Store (1941) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). He won a second Oscar for King Solomon's Mines (1950) in collaboration with Ralph E. Winters. Here is an interesting footnote to Nervig's life: as a naval officer en route to Rio (where he was assigned as a replacement aboard the U.S.S. Glacier), Nervig was a passenger on the ill-fated collier U.S.S. Cyclops during her penultimate voyage. The ship disappeared without trace in March 1918 in the Bermuda Triangle, along with 306 crew and passengers. Fifty-one years after the event (in 1969), Nervig published his recollections -- entitled "The Cyclops Mystery" -- in "The Naval Institute Proceedings".