Ellis R Dungan

Dungan was born on May 11, 1909, in Barton, Ohio. He then moved to India in 1935 after graduating from the University of Southern California. Dungan directed several well-known Tamil film performers as a director in South India, including M. G. Ramachandran in Sathi Leelavathi, T. S. Balaiya, Kali N. Ratnam, and N. S. Krishnan. He played quarterback for the school's football team as a student at St. Clairsville High School. Elis purchased his first box camera to capture images for the school yearbook, where he served as editor-in-chief. Later, in 1932, he enrolled in the newly created Cinematography & Motion Picture Production Department at the University of Southern California. Elis R. Dungan directed Ambikapathy in 1937, in which M. K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar and M. R. Santhanalakshmi were starred.

He travelled to India in 1935 with his undergraduate friend Michael Ormalev at the request of Bombay-born Manik Lal Tandon and invited them to Calcutta, where he directed the Tamil movie Nandanar after those plans fizzled. While Dungan was working directing Nandanar, Tandon connected them to A. N. Marudhachalam Chettiar, a film producer who produced Sathi Leelavathi employed to direct the picture, Sathi Leelavathi, the first film of the future Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. G. Ramachandran. From 1936 to 1950, Dungan produced several Tamil and one Hindi film, Meera. Dungan was a filmmaker for movies in Indian languages, primarily Tamil, despite not knowing any of the languages. Despite the technological restrictions of the time, he developed numerous novel approaches to Indian cinema. Dungan is known for bringing contemporary makeup, the mobile camera, and cabaret dance routines to Tamil cinema and displacing stage play influence.

Manthiri Kumari, a 1950 Tamil film, was his final work. In 1958, he returned to the country and made his home in Wheeling, West Virginia. He established Ellis Dungan Productions there. Over the following thirty years, Duke Goldstone, a Hollywood producer, hired him to make documentaries. Dungan died on December 1, 2001, at the age of 92 at Wheeling. He is credited with having revolutionised Indian cinema and introduced western innovations. An American in Madras, an hour-long documentary about Dungan, was filmed by American filmmaker Karan Bali Bio coming soon... >> Read More... in 2013 using information from the West Virginia State Archives and interviews with those who knew Dungan.