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Val Lewton
Born	Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon May 7, 1904 Yalta, Imperial Russia (now in Ukraine)
Died	March 14, 1951 (aged 46) Los Angeles, California United States
Occupation	novelist, film producer, screenwriter
Years active	1932–1951
Influenced	Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, George Romero, Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, Robert Wise

Val Lewton (May 7, 1904 – March 14, 1951) was an American film producer and screenwriter, best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s.

Early life [edit]

Lewton was born Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon (Russian: Владимир Иванович Левентон, Ukrainian: Володимир Іванович Левентон) in Yalta, Imperial Russia (now in Ukraine), in 1904. He was of Jewish descent, the son of moneylender Max Hofschneider and Nina Leventon, a pharmacist's daughter.^[1] The family converted to Christianity.^[2] He was nephew of actress Alla Nazimova.

His mother left his father and moved to Berlin, taking her children with her. In 1909, they emigrated 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 the best-selling pulp novel No Bed of Her Own, which was later used for the film No Man of Her Own,^[3] with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

Film career [edit]

Lewton worked as a writer for the New York City MGM publicity office, providing novelizations 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 of his 1932 novel No Bed of Her Own, but when three later novels that same year failed to succeed as well, he journeyed to Hollywood for a job writing a screen treatment of Gogol's Taras Bulba for David O. Selznick. The connection for this job came through Lewton's mother, Nina.^{[clarification needed]}

Though a film of Taras 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" 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. Lewton also worked for Selznick as a story editor, a scout for discovering literary properties for Selznick's studio, and as a go-between with the Hollywood censorship system.

In 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO 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.

Lewton's first production was Cat People, released in 1942. The film was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who subsequently also directed I Walked With a Zombie and The 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 of existential 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 and Bedlam, for which he used the pseudonym "Carlos Keith", which he had previously used for the novel Where the Cobra Sings. After RKO promoted Tourneur to A films, Lewton gave first directing opportunities to Robert Wise and Mark Robson.

Between 1945 and 1946, Boris Karloff appeared in three films for RKO produced by Lewton: Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam. In a 1946 interview with Louis Berg, of the Los Angeles Times, Karloff credited Lewton with saving him from what Karloff saw as the overextended Frankenstein franchise at Universal Pictures. Berg writes, "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."^[4]

When RKO head and Lewton supporter Charles 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 of Lucrezia Borgia. Actress Paulette Goddard at Paramount Studios particularly liked Lewton's treatment, and in exchange for the script Lewton was given employment through July 1948. (The Goddard film Bride of Vengeance, heavily rewritten, was released in 1949.) While at Paramount, Lewton also produced the film My Own True Love, released in 1949.

Following his association with Paramount, Lewton worked again for MGM, where he produced the Deborah Kerr film Please 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 famous American Revolutionary War battles at Fort Ticonderoga. Universal Studios made an offer on the work, and though the screenplay was not used, Lewton was given producer duties on the film Apache Drums, released in 1951. This film is usually considered the film most like Lewton's earlier RKO horror films.[citation needed]

Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer tendered an offer to Lewton to work as an assistant producing a series of films at Columbia Studios. Lewton resigned at Universal and began preparation to work on the film My Six Convicts but after suffering gallstone problems, he had the first of two heart attacks which weakened him such that he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1951 at the age of forty-six. The following year, Kirk Douglas appeared in The 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.

Filmography [edit]

RKO [edit]

• 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)
• Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) based on short stories by Guy de Maupassant
• The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
• Youth Runs Wild (1944)
• The Body Snatcher (1945) based on the short story "The Body Snatcher" 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 "A Rake's Progress" by William Hogarth

Other [edit]

• My Own True Love (1949)
• Please Believe Me (1950)
• Apache Drums (1951)

References [edit]

Notes [edit]

Sources [edit]

• Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton
• The Val Lewton B-Unit Page Bio, Photos, Lewton Books

External links [edit]

• Val Lewton at the Internet Movie Database
• Val Lewton at AllRovi
• Val Lewton at the TCM Movie Database
• Val Lewton Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
• Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton – The Man in the Shadows at the Internet Movie Database
• Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton – The Man in the Shadows at the TCM Movie Database
• Review Of Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton – The Man in the Shadows
• Val Lewton B Unit Web Site Pages on Lewton films, biography, ephemera, historic articles, etc.