Eric Pleskow

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Eric Pleskow on the opening evening of the Viennale 2012
Eric Pleskow at the opening of the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz 2011

Eric Pleskow (born April 24, 1924 in Vienna , Austria , as Erich Pleskoff ; † October 1, 2019 in Westport , Connecticut , United States ) was an Austrian-American film producer and president of the film production companies United Artists and Orion Pictures .

life and career

Eric Pleskow was one of the two sons of a Jewish merchant family in Vienna . As he remembered for a TV show in 2011, the family lived in a bourgeois manner in Alsergrund , the 9th district, in Porzellangasse opposite the tobacco control room . His brother was seriously disabled after suffering from meningitis and "would never have received an affidavit for the USA" (Pleskow); he died in 1937.

After the "Anschluss" of Austria and the " Aryanization " of their parents' apartment, he and his parents had to emigrate to the USA in 1939 to avoid persecution and murder. In New York the 15-year-old soon received an assistantship in a filmmaker who it Editor taught, and attended evening the College .

In 1943 he was drafted into the US military and because of his knowledge of foreign languages ​​came to the Counter Intelligence Corps . After the Second World War , Pleskow was transferred to Europe, conducted interrogations in denazification proceedings and was employed as a film expert. According to his memory in 2011, he was also ordered to film the execution of twelve people condemned to death by the occupation forces for documentary purposes in the Landsberg am Lech prison , where Hitler wrote his book Mein Kampf in 1924 . As a film officer, he was then given the task of rebuilding the Bavaria Studios , although he had never headed a film studio before.

Pleskow remained loyal to the film business afterwards. From 1951 he was responsible for distributing American films in Europe and South Africa at United Artists and began producing his first films. In 1973 he became President of United Artists. Under him, this film studio managed to win the Oscar for best film three years in a row : 1975 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , 1976 for Rocky and 1977 for Der Stadtneurotiker .

In 1978 Pleskow left United Artists and founded Orion Pictures , whose management he held until 1992. The greatest successes of the studio under Pleskow's leadership were Amadeus , Dances with Wolves , The Silence of the Lambs , Platoon and Terminator . In 1985 he was involved as a producer on Rangoon - In the Heart of the Storm .

From 1998 to the end, Pleskow, who had seen Vienna for the first time after the war in 1948, was president of the Viennale film festival . In February 2007 he was made an honorary citizen of the City of Vienna . In 2009 he received the Great Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria , after he had already been awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art , 1st Class, in 1999 . He got the Golden City Hall Man in 2019 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Eric Pleskow  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Hollywood legend Eric Pleskow is dead. Report on ORF .at, October 1, 2019. Accessed October 1, 2019.
  2. Time.History. The porcelain street boys. Ari Rath and Eric Pleskow in conversation , ORF III , produced 2011, broadcast on May 5, 2012
  3. In 2002 Lutz Hachmeister made the documentary - Das Prison, together with the Landsberg historian Anton Posset . Landsberg and the emergence of the republic - all about this topic, which is emotionally much discussed locally in Landsberg, and the historical significance of the Landsberg am Lech prison. Here u. a. Eric Pleskow, who documented several executions with a camera, is interviewed.
  4. List of sponsors , Pleskow: serial no. 1919 and 1306
  5. Mayor Ludwig honored film producer Eric Pleskow with the Golden Town Hall Man . OTS announcement of April 23, 2019, accessed April 23, 2019