Val Lewton

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Vladimir Ivan Leventon (born May 7, 1904 in Yalta , Russian Empire , † March 14, 1951 in Hollywood , California ) was a (naturalized) American film producer and screenwriter . He created the genre of "thinking" horror films , which let the horror arise in the mind of the viewer rather than show it directly on the screen.

life and work

Val Lewton was born in 1904 in the Crimea , the son of Nina Leventon, a sister of the actress Alla Nazimova and later godmother of the future American First Lady Nancy Reagan . In 1905 the family moved to Berlin . In 1909 he emigrated to the USA with his sister and mother. He grew up in New York City and changed his name to Val Lewton . He was evidently a conflict-averse child. All his life he was considered a bookworm who was also able to memorize all the stories he had ever read.

He studied journalism at Columbia University . At that time, Val Lewton wrote everything that could be sold: pulp stories, poems, reports. So that it would not be noticed that a single man provided so much material, he sometimes used pseudonyms (e.g. Carlos Keith , a name that he later used for some films). He lost his job as a reporter for the Darien-Stamford Review when it was discovered that a story he'd made up about a truckload of kosher chickens killed in the New York heatwave was entirely made up. He got his first job in the film business in the 1920s through his mother, who worked as a story editor for the film.

As a freelance writer, he wrote several books. In 1932 he landed a bestseller with No Bed of Her Own , which was filmed in the same year with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in the leading roles under the title No Man of Her Own . He became a journalist at MGM and assistant to David O. Selznick .

He was first mentioned in an opening credits in David O. Selznick 's A Tale of Two Cities (Escape from Paris). He worked on the screenplay of Gone with the Wind without being named (for example, the scene in which the camera goes up and shows hundreds of injured civil war soldiers comes from him).

In the early 1940s, the RKO was in financial difficulties and therefore decided to follow the example of Universal Studios and set up a department for cheap horror films. The films should be produced so cheaply that they would definitely make a profit. In 1942 Lewton was appointed head of RKO's horror division. He got $ 250 a week as wages and, apart from three conditions, complete freedom (content). The three conditions were:

  • Each completed film was allowed to have a maximum budget of $ 150,000.
  • Each film could have a maximum running time of 75 minutes. (This made the evaluation in double features easier.)
  • The film titles are given to Val Lewton. (They were determined through marketing tests; however, starting with The Curse of the Cat People , Val Lewton was also able to choose titles.)

Lewton hit the bull's eye right away with the first film in 1942. Katzenmenschen (Cat People) with Simone Simon cost $ 134,000 and probably made a profit of $ 183,000 (the sources differ widely, some also mention significantly more). The success of Cat People led the production company RKO to commission an entire cycle of similar films. Lewton produced a total of 11 films for the RKO:

Lewton surprised his clients with the high standards of the B movies. He often used literary models as the basis of the stories (including from Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant ), he was inspired by classical paintings and peppered the films with quotes from John Donne , Shakespeare , Hippocrates and Sigmund Freud .

Although Lewton is only named as a producer in the opening credits, he is considered the driving artistic force behind these films. He didn't want to be named in multiple roles, though, as he feared it looked like he was abusing his power as a producer in order to be featured in the opening credits as often as possible. So he dives z. B. in Der Leichendieb und Bedlam under the pseudonym Carlos Keith as a co-writer.

Thanks to the success of his RKO films, Val Lewton was allowed to shoot two A-films for other studios from 1947 to 1950.

The films are not considered particularly good. The most common explanation is that with the larger budget, the studios also had a greater influence on the films. In 1951 he shot another B-movie, the Western Drums of Death (Apache Drums) for Universal Studios.

In the last years of his life Lewton had a number of health problems, he died on March 14, 1951, the last of a series of heart attacks.

Templates / inspirations of the films

Trivia

  • The shower scene from The Seventh Victim is said to have inspired the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho .
  • The panther's shadow in the Catmen's swimming pool scene is actually the hand of Val Lewton himself.
  • The scandalous song from I Followed a Zombie is based on a true story described by Donald R. Hill in his book Calypso Calaloo : In Trinidad in 1933 a horned husband commissioned a calypso band to write a song about his own wife and her lover , the then police chief of Trinidad. The song became very popular under the title Country Club Scandal , sung by King Radio.
  • The Leopard Dynamite that starred in The Leopard Man also played the panther in Catmen .
  • The Ghost Ship couldn't be seen for 50 years after the RKO and Lewton lost a copyright battle. It was assumed that Lewton had taken over large parts of the script from another script.
  • Martin Scorsese produced the TV documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007) by Kent Jones and also acted as an off-narrator.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lewton, Val
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vladimir Ivan Leventon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film producer
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Yalta , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1951
Place of death Hollywood , California