Rudolf Meyer (film producer)

Rudolf "Rudi" Meyer (born December 27, 1901 in Suhl , German Empire , † September 16, 1969 in Amsterdam , Netherlands ) was a German-Dutch film salesman and film producer .

Live and act

Rudi Meyer came to film in the 1920s through his uncle Erich Pommer , then head of production at Decla , and held various positions in this sector. Most recently he worked as an authorized signatory and head of the export department of the Berlin production company Aafa Film AG of producer Gabriel Levy . The National Socialism in Germany drove the Jews Meyer in 1933 out of the country and led him, together with his former boss Levy, to Amsterdam, where Meyer opened his own distribution company focused on the acquisition of Dutch, Belgian and French films.

Even before a number of German fellow exiles had also settled in the Netherlands, Meyer and Levy founded the Hollandsche Film Productie production facility with Jo Pearl, the head of the Dutch branch of the Hollywood company Universal Studios , in 1934. Meyer has been producing films independently since 1935. Until the Wehrmacht invaded his new home, Meyer produced a number of ambitious productions by directors such as Hermann Kosterlitz , Ludwig Berger , Karel Lamač and Friedrich Zelnik who had fled Hitler's Germany . In 1939 he also became a board member of the film distribution company Filmex.

Meyer spent the first four years of the occupation (1940 to 1944) relatively safely in Holland, protected by his marriage to a non-Jewish woman. It was not until 1944 that the Germans deported him to the Auschwitz extermination camp , which, however, he survived reasonably intact. After the liberation, Rudolf Meyer returned to his adopted home and continued his sporadic production activities there with documentaries and ambitious feature films, some of which dealt with the Nazi occupation of Holland and were directed by well-known filmmakers such as Bert Haanstra , Paul Rotha and Kees Brusse . His main field of activity, however, remained his work for Filmex. There he remained active until his death and brought Dutch cinema-goers, among other things, closer to the Sissi films in the 1950s .

Filmography

• 1935: De kribbebijter
• 1936: Amsterdam by night
• 1937: Pygmalion
• 1938: Vadertje Langbeen
• 1939: Tomorrow we don't pray!
• 1939: De spooktrein
• 1940: Ergens in Nederland
• 1953: Sterren stralen overal
• 1958: ... and the music blows (fanfare)
• 1960: De zack MP
• 1962: De overval
• 1964: People of Tomorrow (Mensen van Morgen)

Web links

• Biography Rudolf Meyer
• Rudolf Meyer at the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rudolf Meyer , report in the Österreichische Film-Zeitung from November 11, 1933