Hollywood's finest professionals in their fields: Set designer William Cameron Menzies, cinematographer James Wong Howe and composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, collectively creating a film of "classical proportions." Biographer Tony Thomas offers this appraisal: The Pride of the Yankees (1942): Sam Goldwyn and RKO When beloved baseball player Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees died, aged thirty-seven in 1941 of ALS, a fatal neuromuscular disorder, Wood determined that a film biography was in order. The career of the "modest and likable" Gehrig spanned 17 years (1923-1939), during which he played more than two thousand consecutive games. Though idolized by his fans, Wood met with resistance from studio executives to a project that was likely to appeal to only half of the American demographic: male sports fans. Wood, an ardent sports enthusiast, was able to sway producer Sam Goldwyn to sponsor the film, and they both agreed that the picture would be an "ideal vehicle" for Gary Cooper, "a kind of idealization of the American male", and significantly, under contract to Goldwyn, to whom Cooper owed one more film. An avid outdoorsman, Cooper was virtually ignorant of baseball as a professional sport, but complied with his contract. Wood's encouragement and support for Cooper served to create a satisfactory portrayal of Gehrig, matching "the perfect actor with the perfect director" assuring the film's success. While filming on set, Wood was initially dismayed at what at first appeared to be Cooper's inept acting. Upon reviewing the actual footage, Wood was relieved and pleased to discover that Cooper's "underplaying" translated effectively to the screen. Cooper was nominated by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for Best Actor, and the film earned nine more nominations, including Best Picture. The Pride of the Yankees remains "one of the best and most popular screen biographies as well as the quintessential baseball movie." Even as Wood was filming Kings Row for Warner Brothers in 1941, he began working on his major project for Paramount: an adaption of novelist Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Wood proceeded to shoot numerous landscape scenes in the High Sierra Nevada range before the cast for the movie had been selected. Production on the film was set aside when Wood made The Pride of the Yankees for Samuel Goldwyn, and only returned to For Whom the Bell Tolls when that project was completed. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Paramount