F. W. Murnau

F. W. Murnau's first American film was Sunrise, from 1927. On City Girl, made in 1930, he was taken off the directing before the film was finished; by the AFI it was A. F. Buddy Erickson who directed the ending added afterwards and the comic relief scenes interspersed through it, and the page gives the two names together as director. He wrote the story of Tabu: A Story of the South Seas with Robert Flaherty; the story was called Turia at first, the film was shot on the islands of Bora Bora and Takapota in Tahiti, and the two of them spent eight months there. By an assessment the AFI relays, although they wrote the screenplay together Flaherty's share came to less than five per cent of the whole and most of it was not usable; in David Flaherty's words, Murnau made a Murnau film out there. Murnau died in a car accident near Santa Barbara on 11 March 1931, the night he finished assembling the film. He was buried in Berlin.