Val Lewton

Val Lewton
Born	Vladimir Ivan Leventon 1904 May 7 Yalta, Ukraine
Died	1951 March 14 (age 46) Los Angeles, California US
Other name(s)	Carlos Keith
Occupation	novelist, film producer, screenwriter
Years active	1932–1951

Val Lewton (May 7, 1904–March 14, 1951) was an American film producer and screenwriter, who is best known for a sequence of nine brooding horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s.

Lewton, born Vladimir Ivan Leventon, was born in what is now Yalta, Ukraine. He was a nephew of the actress Alla Nazimova. In 1909, he emigrated with his sister and mother to the United States, where his name was changed to Val Lewton. He was raised in suburban Port Chester, New York.

He studied journalism at Columbia University and authored eighteen works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Lewton once lost his job as a reporter for the Darien-Stamford Review after it was discovered that a story he wrote about a truckload of kosher chickens dying in a New York heat wave was a total fabrication.

In 1932 he wrote a best-selling pulp novel No Bed of Her Own, which was later used in the making of the film No Man of Her Own,^[1] with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

Film career

Lewton worked as a writer for the New York City MGM publicity office, providing novelizations of popular movies for serialization in magazines, which were sometimes later collected into book form. He also wrote promotional copy. He quit this position after the success of his 1932 novel No Bed of Her Own, but when three later novels that same year failed to succeed as well, he journeyed to Hollywood for a job writing a screen treatment of Gogol's Taras Bulba for David O. Selznick. The connection for this job came through Lewton's mother, Nina Lewton.

Though a film of Taras Bulba did not follow, Lewton was hired by MGM to work as a publicist and assistant to Selznick. His first screen credit was "revolutionary sequences arranged by" in David O. Selznick’s 1935 version of A Tale of Two Cities. Lewton also worked as an uncredited writer for Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, including writing the scene where the camera pulls back to reveal hundreds of wounded soldiers at the Atlanta Depot. Lewton also functioned for Selznick as a story editor, a scout for discovering literary properties for Selznick's studio, and acted as a go-between with the Hollywood censorship system.

In 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO studios, at a salary of US$250 per week. As head of the B-horror unit he would have to follow three rules: each film had to come in under a US$150,000 budget, each film was to run under seventy-five minutes, and Lewton's supervisors would supply the title for each film.

Lewton's first production was Cat People, released in 1942. The film was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who subsequently also directed I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man for Lewton. Made for US$134,000, the film went on to earn nearly US$4 million, and was the top moneymaker for RKO that year. This success enabled Lewton to make his next films with relatively little studio interference, allowing him to avoid the sensationalist material suggested by the film titles he was given, instead focusing on ominous suggestion and themes of existential ambivalence.

Lewton always wrote the final draft of the screenplays for his films, but avoided an on-screen co-writing credit except in two cases, The Body Snatcher and Bedlam, for which he used the pseudonym "Carlos Keith", which he had previously used on the novel, Where the Cobra Sings. After Jacques Tourneur left RKO's horror film unit, Lewton gave first directing opportunities to Robert Wise and Mark Robson.

From 1945-1946, Boris Karloff appeared in three films for RKO produced by Lewton: Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam. In a 1946 interview with Louis Berg, of the Los Angeles Times, Karloff credited Lewton with saving him from what Karloff saw as the overextended Frankenstein franchise at Universal Pictures. Berg writes, "Mr. Karloff has great love and respect for Mr. Lewton as the man who rescued him from the living dead and restored, so to speak, his soul"^[2].

When RKO head Charles Koerner died in 1946, the studio went through personnel and management upheavals, ultimately leaving Lewton unemployed and in ill health after suffering a minor heart attack. Through connections, he rewrote an unused screenplay based upon the life of Lucrezia Borgia. The actress Paulette Goddard at Paramount Studios particularly liked Lewton's treatment, and in exchange for the script Lewton was given employment through July 1948. (The Goddard film Bride of Vengeance, heavily rewritten, was released in 1949.) While at Paramount, Lewton also produced the film My Own True Love, released in 1949.

Following his association with Paramount, Lewton worked again for MGM where he produced the Deborah Kerr film Please Believe Me, released in 1950. During this time Lewton attempted to start an independent production company with his former protégés Wise and Robson, but when a disagreement over which property to produce first arose, Lewton was kicked out. Lewton spent time at home working on a screenplay about the famous American Revolutionary War battles at Fort Ticonderoga. Universal Studios made an offer on the work, and though the screenplay was not used, Lewton was given producer duties on the film Apache Drums, released in 1951. This film is usually considered the film most like Lewton's earlier RKO horror films.

Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer tendered an offer to Lewton to work as an assistant producing a series of films at Columbia Studios. Lewton resigned at Universal and began preparation to work on the film My Six Convicts but after suffering gallstone problems, he had the first of two heart attacks which weakened him such that he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1951 at the age of forty-six. The following year, Kirk Douglas appeared in The Bad and the Beautiful; his character was partly based on Lewton.

A number of books and two documentaries on Lewton have been produced. A documentary film, Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton - The Man in the Shadows, was released in 2007.

RKO films

• Cat People (1942)
• I Walked With a Zombie (1943)
• The Leopard Man (1943) based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich
• The Seventh Victim (1943)
• The Ghost Ship (1943)
• The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
• Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) based on short stories by Guy de Maupassant
• Youth Runs Wild (1944)
• The Body Snatcher (1945) based on the short story "The Body Snatchers" by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Isle of the Dead (1945), suggested by the two paintings with that name by Arnold Boecklin
• Bedlam (1946) suggested by the eighth (and last) engraving in the series "A Rake's Progress" by William Hogarth.

References

Notes

Sources

• Review of Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton
• The Val Lewton B-Unit Page Bio, Photos, Lewton Books

External links

• Val Lewton at the Internet Movie Database
• Val Lewton at Allmovie
• Val Lewton at the TCM Movie Database
• Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton - The Man in the Shadows at the Internet Movie Database
• Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton - The Man in the Shadows at the TCM Movie Database
• Review Of Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton - The Man in the Shadows
• Val Lewton B Unit Web Site Pages on Lewton films, biography, ephemera, historic articles, etc.