It is difficult to find information on a still photo­grapher working under contract with the big Hollywood production companies at the time when James Frank Shugrue plied his trade. The known part of his career lasted nearly thirty years, from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s. As with his colleagues, he was hardly ever mentioned in the credits on the screen and today the thousands of photos he took are rarely credited to his name.

Frank Shugrue was born in Alameda (California) on December 11, 1910, to Thomas F. and Isabelle Shugrue. In the late 1920's we find him installed with his family in Santa Monica and playing football at the age of 19 in the University team. Living with them, there was also a certain related John T. Shugrue who is cited as a "studio worker". Maybe with the help of Tom, his father, who was already in the place at the M.G.M. Studios as an electrician, or John, Frank was hired by the company in 1935 as a member of the recently created Front Office Crew, which was a group of young men in charge of the protection and care of the movie stars.

Ten years after this first experience, we find Frank credited as the first camera assistant on Victor Fleming's"Adventure for M.G.M. in 1945. He might have worked longer in the camera department than this unique mention tells, but we don't know more about that. Soon after, he started out a new career as a still photo­grapher. Frank wasn't the only one in this role at M.G.M. Studios, he was one of the many other "Still Men" who worked for the company: Virgil Apger, Kenny Bell, Milton Brown, Eric Carpenter, Otto Dyar, Bud Graybill, Jerry Hester, Eddie Hubbell, Bert Lynch, James Manatt, and others. Their job consisted mostly to take production shots and scene stills but they were also asked to make promotional pictures of M.G.M.'s stars which were reproduced in magazines.

Frank worked for about 20 years for the M.G.M. Studios exclusively. But from the mid-1960s, his employers became more varied: Universal, Warner, Paramount in addition to other independent producers. During his career, he rubbed shoulders with great directors and took photos of films that have remained famous, we let you discover them in the timeline below. You will notice that the filming periods sometimes overlap because Frank could take, for example, sets or wardrobe tests photos for a few days and then be called upon the following week on another film shooting to take scene stills.

Very few sources list the movies Frank Shugrue worked on and they don't all say the same thing. By combining the information from A.F.I., B.F.I., I.M.Db. and TCM with some rare other sources (the A.M.P.A.S. Collections, the Swedish Film Database, the Motion Picture Production Encyclopedia...), we arrive at a total of forty films or so with many periods where information is missing, sometimes for nearly two years during which we know nothing of the films in which he participated. In addition to these forty movies listed, we can add around ten other films for which no source mentions the presence of Shugrue. These are only the letters "S,H,U,G" appearing on a few rare photographs taken for references of sets, makeup or wardrobe which attest to his participation in their filming. Among these are our favorites, Forbidden Planet (1955) and The Time Machine (1959). The lists cited above are therefore very incomplete and Frank must have worked on many other films during all the periods where it seems that he did nothing at all.