Alex Grasshoff, a television and film director who won an Academy Award in 1969 for best feature-length documentary and then made Oscar history when he and his fellow producer had to return their golden statuettes on a technicality, has died. He was 79.
Grasshoff died April 5 at his home in Los Angeles of complications from bypass surgery on a leg, said his wife, Madilyn Clark Grasshoff.
A USC film school graduate who launched his career as an editor at Paramount in the 1950s, Grasshoff and fellow producer Robert Cohn were elated when their film, "Young Americans," won the Oscar for best feature documentary at the Academy Awards ceremony in April 1969.
Grasshoff also wrote and directed the film, which chronicled the adventures of the Young Americans singing group on its cross-country summer tour by bus.
"We slept with the Oscar the first night," Madilyn Clark Grasshoff recalled with a laugh last week. "It was very, very exciting, my gosh."
But then came the big letdown for the two producers when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences discovered a few weeks later that "Young Americans" had first been shown in a theater in October 1967, which made it ineligible for a 1968 award in the documentary category.
Grasshoff's wife said Academy President Gregory Peck personally called her husband and Cohn, "and they had a big to-do over it."
"What happened was, it was a trial sneak preview in some little town in, like, North Carolina," she said. "I don't know why they didn't fight it, because it was not released."
Academy Awards historian Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies, said Friday that it was "the first time that an Academy Award has been presented to somebody and celebrated and days after has been collected and taken back.
"I always point it out because it's so unusual," Osborne said. "But it's also a great cautionary tale for everybody, because even if you win an Oscar, you can't be totally sure you're going to keep it.
"It's also a great indication that the academy doesn't take any of these things casually, and they really follow through to make sure the rules are followed."
On May 8, 1969, the first runner-up, "Journey Into Self," was declared the official Oscar winner for best feature documentary.
"Of course, it was a major disappointment," Madilyn Clark Grasshoff said. For her husband, having reached the film-industry pinnacle of earning an Academy Award -- and then not -- was "painful."
