Val Lewton

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Val Lewton (7 May 1904 – 14 March 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 immigrated 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. The book was later made into the film No Man of Her Own,^[1] with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

1 Film career
2 RKO films
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Film career

He began his film career in the early 1930s as an MGM publicist and assistant to David O. 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.

In 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO studios, at a salary of $250 a week. As head of the B-horror unit he would have to follow three rules: each film had to come in under a $150,000 budget, each film was to run under 75 minutes, and Lewton's supervisors would supply the title for each film.

Lewton's first production was Cat People. The film was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who subsequently also directed I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man for Lewton. Made for $134,000, the film went on to earn nearly $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.

Lewton died of a heart attack on March 14, 1951, at the age of 46. A new documentary film on Lewton, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, narrated by admirer Martin Scorsese, premiered on Turner Classic Movies on January 14, 2008.

[edit] 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)
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 The Rake's Progress by William Hogarth.