Val Lewton | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon (1904-05-07)May 7, 1904 Yalta,Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Died | March 14, 1951(1951-03-14) (aged 46) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1932–1951 |
| Spouse | Ruth Knapp |
| Children | 2, includingVal |
Val Lewton (May 7, 1904 – March 14, 1951) was a Russian-American novelist, film producer, and screenwriter best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced forRKO Pictures in the 1940s. His son, also namedVal Lewton, was a painter and exhibition designer.
Lewton was born inYalta, Imperial Russia, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1909. He began his career as a writer, producing novels, including the best-selling pulp novelNo Bed of Her Own. Lewton worked as a writer and publicist for MGM before being named head of RKO's horror unit in 1942. His first production,Cat People, became a top moneymaker for RKO that year. Lewton produced several successful films, often writing the final draft of the screenplays himself. He gave first directing opportunities toRobert Wise andMark Robson and worked withBoris Karloff, who credited Lewton with saving his career. After leaving RKO, Lewton worked forParamount andMGM, producing various films. His life and work have inspired books, documentaries, and an upcoming feature film.
Lewton was bornVladimir Ivanovich Hofschneider orLeventon[1] (Russian:Владимир Иванович Левентон,Ukrainian:Володимир Іванович Левентон, both with surname Leventon) inYalta,Imperial Russia (now inUkraine), in 1904. He was ofJewish descent, the son of moneylender Max Hofschneider and Anna "Nina" Leventon, a pharmacist's daughter.[2] The family converted to Christianity.[3]He was nephew of actressAlla Nazimova.
His mother left his father and moved to Berlin, taking their two children with her. In 1909, they emigrated to the United States as second cabin class passengers on board theSSAmerika, which sailed from Hamburg, 29 April, and arrived in New York City, 8 May; they were listed as Anna, Olga, and Vladimir Hofschneider. In America, he eventually changed his name to Wladimir Ivan Lewton, which came to be abbreviated as Val Lewton. Upon arrival in New York, Anna Hofschneider and her children joined the household of her famous sister, Alla Nazimova, in Rye, New York; she then reverted a version of her maiden name, Lewton, and earned her living by writing for the films. Her children and she later moved to suburbanPort Chester, New York. Val was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in a federal court in Los Angeles as Wladimir Ivan Lewton in June 1941.
In 1920, when Lewton was 16, he lost his job as a society reporter for theDarien-Stamford Review after a story he wrote about a truckload of kosher chickens dying in a New York heat wave was found to be a total fabrication.[4] He went on to study journalism atColumbia University and authored 18 works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
In 1932, he wrote the best-selling pulp novelNo Bed of Her Own, which was later used for the filmNo Man of Her Own,[5] withClark Gable andCarole Lombard. In 1933, Lewton clandestinely publishedGrushenka: Three Times a Woman, an erotic novel whose publication would have subjected Lewton to criminal penalties given the mores of the time.Grushenka purported to be a translation from the Russian and brought from the Soviet Union, but this was a ruse to protect the book's real author.[6]
Lewton worked as a writer atMGM's publicity office in New York City, providingnovelizations 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 ofNo Bed of Her Own, but when three later novels that same year failed to succeed, he journeyed to Hollywood for a job writing a screen treatment ofGogol'sTaras Bulba forDavid O. Selznick. The connection for this job came through Lewton's mother, Nina.[7]
Though a film ofTaras 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" inDavid O. Selznick's 1935 version ofA Tale of Two Cities. Lewton also worked as an uncredited writer for Selznick'sGone with the Wind, including writing the scene where the camera pulls back to reveal hundreds of wounded soldiers at the Atlanta depot. Lewton also worked for Selznick as astory editor, a scout for discovering literary properties for Selznick's studio, and a go-between with the Hollywood censorship system.
On the documentaryThe Making of Gone With the Wind, Lewton is described by another Selznick employee as warning thatGone With the Wind was unfilmable and that Selznick would be making "the mistake of his life" trying to make a successful movie of it.
In 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit atRKO studios at a salary of US$250 per week. He would have to follow three rules: Each film had to come in under a US$150,000 budget, each was to run under 75 minutes, and Lewton's supervisors would supply the film titles prior to the start of production.
Lewton's first production wasCat People, released in 1942. The film was directed byJacques Tourneur, who subsequently also directedI Walked With a Zombie andThe 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 fulfill his vision despite the sensationalistic film titles he was given, focusing on ominous suggestion and themes ofexistential ambivalence.
Lewton always wrote the final draft of the screenplays for his films, but avoided on-screen co-writing credits except in two cases,The Body Snatcher andBedlam, for which he used the pseudonym "Carlos Keith", which he had previously used for the novels4 Wives,A Laughing Woman,This Fool, Passion, andWhere the Cobra Sings. After RKO promoted Tourneur to A-films, Lewton gave first directing opportunities toRobert Wise andMark Robson.
Between 1945 and 1946,Boris Karloff appeared in three films for RKO produced by Lewton:Isle of the Dead,The Body Snatcher, andBedlam. In a 1946 interview with Louis Berg of theLos Angeles Times, Karloff credited Lewton with saving him from what Karloff saw as the overextended Frankenstein franchise atUniversal Pictures. Berg wrote, "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."[8]
When RKO head and Lewton supporterCharles 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 ofLucrezia Borgia. ActressPaulette Goddard atParamount Studios particularly liked Lewton's treatment, and in exchange for the script, Lewton was given employment through July 1948. (The Goddard filmBride of Vengeance, heavily rewritten, was released in 1949.) While at Paramount, Lewton also produced the filmMy Own True Love, released in 1949.
Following his association with Paramount, Lewton worked again for MGM, where he produced theDeborah Kerr filmPlease Believe Me, released in 1950. During this time, Lewton attempted to start an independent production company with 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 famousAmerican Revolutionary War battles atFort Ticonderoga.Universal Studios made an offer on the work, and though the screenplay was not used, Lewton was given producer duties on the filmApache Drums, released in 1951. This film is usually considered the film most like Lewton's earlier RKO horror films.[citation needed]
Hollywood producerStanley Kramer tendered an offer to Lewton to work as an assistant producing a series of films atColumbia Studios. Lewton resigned at Universal and began preparation to work on the filmMy Six Convicts, but after suffering gallstone problems, he had the first of two heart attacks, which weakened him so much that he died atCedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1951 at the age of 46. The following year,Kirk Douglas appeared inThe 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.
In May 2017,The Secret History Of Hollywood, a podcast biopic series by Adam Roche, began an 11-part season on his life and work – "Shadows" – featuringMark Gatiss. In June 2021, it was announced that "Shadows" was to be turned into a feature film, co-written by Roche andLaeta Kalogridis, with Kalogridis also acting as producer alongsideBradley Fischer.[9]
He became known for the Lewton bus device fromCat People, as similar practices were employed in his subsequent film productions – later becoming known as thejump scare.
Edmund G. Bansak.Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995.
