- Entered into Guinness World Records as having "The Longest Career As A Film Director", spanning 67 years beginning with Hurricane in Galveston (1913) in 1913 and ending with the documentary The Metaphor (1980) in 1980.
- Directed the black-and-white sequences (the Kansas scenes), including "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", in The Wizard of Oz (1939) when director Victor Fleming was forced to leave the production to move to Gone with the Wind (1939).
- Was obsessed by the unsolved murder of 1920s director William Desmond Taylor. He spent all of 1967 attempting to learn the identity of Taylor's killer and planned to turn the story into a movie.
- When Orson Welles received the achievement award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, he acknowledged his debt to Vidor as a friend and mentor.
- Survived the most horrific hurricane to ever hit the US, the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston, TX, on September 8, 1900. This tropical cyclone killed an estimated 6,000 people, fully one-third of the city's population. Vidor wrote a fictional account of the storm entitled "Southern Storm" for the May 1935 issue of "Esquire" magazine.
- In 1978, he (co-presenter) accepted the Oscar for "Best Director" on behalf of Woody Allen, who wasn't present at the awards ceremony
- Began at Universal Studios as a clerk for $12 per week.
- The young Vidor wrote 52 scripts before one was accepted. After he began being employed in several jobs at Universal, he continued to write under a pen name in order to circumvent the studio's rule that no employee was allowed to sell an original scenario to the studio.
- The city of Vidor, Texas, was named after his father Charles Shelton Vidor, a prominent businessman who founded the Miller-Vidor Lumber Co., and the town grew up around it.
- His wartime drama The Big Parade (1925) cost about $200,000. However, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg was so impressed by the rough cut that he ordered additional war footage to be shot in order to bolster production values. That extra footage brought the cost of the film up to $380,000.
- He retired after making Solomon and Sheba (1959), settling on his Paso Robles ranch in San Luis Obispo County, CA. In later years he lectured film students and budding filmmakers in directing at the University of Southern California.
- Directed six different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Wallace Beery, Robert Donat, Barbara Stanwyck, Anne Shirley, Jennifer Jones and Lillian Gish. Beery won an Oscar for The Champ (1931).
- Having been talked out of his percentage of the net profits for The Big Parade (1925) by Louis B. Mayer, Vidor received as compensation assurances of being able to freely select his own subject matter in between studio assignments. This led directly to his two major successes in the late 1920s, The Crowd (1928)--a downbeat story of city life--and the pioneering all-black musical Hallelujah (1929).
- Early in 1920 Vidor bought a square block of Santa Monica Boulevard and built Vidor Village, his own movie studio. The first movie filmed there was an adaptation of an Ellis Parker Butler book, The Jack-Knife Man (1920).
- The Big Parade (1925) was a huge hit. When MGM discovered that a clause in Vidor's contract entitled him to 20% of the net profits, studio lawyers called a meeting with him. At the meeting, MGM accountants played up the costs of the picture while downgrading the studio forecast of its potential success. Vidor was persuaded to sell his stake in the film for a small sum. The film ran for 96 weeks at the Astor Theater alone and grossed $5 million (approximately $67.3 million in 2014 dollars) domestically by 1930, making it the most profitable release in MGM history at that point.
- His grandfather, Karoly (Charles) Vidor, was a Hungarian immigrant who serve with the 1st Texas Infantry at the battle of Gettysburg.
- Vidor was one of the most important directors to work at MGM during its heyday, under contract 1923-1930, and 1938-1944 (in between, a spell at Paramount, 1935-1936). After he left the studio, he directed one of his best films, the epic western Duel in the Sun (1946) for Selznick, then was briefly under contract at Warner Brothers, 1949-50.
- (1936-1938) President of the Screen Directors Guild.
- Received his Walk of Fame star on the day of his 66th birthday (February 8, 1960).
- He has directed six films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Show People (1928), Hallelujah (1929), Our Daily Bread (1934) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) (uncredited).
- At five, he received more Academy Award nominations for Best Picture without a win than anyone other than Clarence Brown. He was nominated for The Crowd (1928), Hallelujah (1929), The Champ (1931), The Citadel (1938) and War and Peace (1956).
- Father of Suzanne Vidor Parry (b. 1919) by his first marriage to Florence Vidor and Antonia Vidor (b. 1927) and Belinda Vidor Holiday (b. 1930) by his second marriage to Eleanor Boardman.
- Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 1130-1136. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
- Served as uncredited "technical advisor" on three Pare Lorentz documentaries: The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1938) and The Fight for Life (1940).
- Amongst all the top directors Billy Wilder had the most Oscar nominations with 8 Fred Zinneman 7, Frank Capra 6 David Lean 6, Clarence Brown 5, John Ford 5, King Vidor 5 George Stevens 5 Alfred Hitchcock 5 George Cukor 5.
- Head of jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1962
- Was an amateur guitarist.
- Founder and president of King Vidor Productions, formed in 1920.
- Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 823-825. New York: Charles Scribner's.
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