Sam Katzman
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Sam Katzman (July 7, 1901 – August 4, 1973) was an American film producer.
Born in New York, New York to a poor Jewish family, at the age of thirteen he went to work as a stage laborer in the fledgling East Coast film industry. He would learn all aspects of filmmaking and become a highly successful Hollywood producer for more than forty years.
Sam Katzman never made great film classics, instead he produced cost-effective productions that made money for the studios and the financial backers. He is noted for numerous Western films of the 1940s and early 1950s and the fifteen-episode Superman serial of 1948. At MGM Studios in the 1960s, Katzman produced several Elvis Presley films and singer Roy Orbison's only film, The Fastest Guitar Alive.
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[edit] Childhood and Early Career
Born to Abraham and Rebecca Katzman in New York City on July 7, 1901, Katzman entered the film industry shortly before World War I, as a gopher for the old Fox Film Corporation, which was then making low-budget short films at their studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey. As a mail carrier, prop boy, and laboratory messenger, carrying cans of exposed film back and forth to the lab, Katzman quickly learned all the angles of the low-budget film business, and gradually rose to the rank of assistant director. But Katzman suddenly found himself out of a job, when Fox let him go in a wave of cutbacks that coincided with Fox’s merger with 20th Century films. Katzman thus became an independent producer and created his first venture, a feature-length film, His Private Secretary (1937), which he wrote himself. John Wayne was featured in the picture, which Sam made in six days at an over-all cost of $13,000. From this modest beginning, Katzman never looked back.
[edit] Katzman moves from Monogram Pictures to Columbia Pictures
During the early 1940s, Katzman labored for Monogram Pictures, but when he made the move to Columbia, Katzman began grinding out serials and low-budget features at a truly torrential pace. On the set, Katzman would use his collection of canes as a personal prop, banging them against the floor, or the scenery, when production fell behind schedule. Indeed, the pace of Sam Katzman’s film production from 1950 to 1959 is blistering, touching nearly all the generic bases in the process. Starting in 1950 with William A. Berke’s Mark of the Gorilla, Katzman proved himself a master of all genres, with such films as Lew Landers’ Tyrant of the Sea (1950), a rapidly paced swashbuckler; Spencer Gordon Bennet’s Cody of the Pony Express (1950), an elegiac western chapter-play; the near-documentary State Penitentiary (Lew Landers, 1950); the rousing action serial Pirates of the High Seas (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1959); Chain Gang (Lew Landers, 1950); a hard-boiled exposé of the prison system reminiscent of Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang; A Yank in Korea (Lew Landers, 1951), a topical war tale covering the then-escalating conflict; Richard Quine’s wartime drama Purple Heart Diary (1951); The Magic Carpet (Lew Landers, 1951), an Arabian Nights fantasy done on a shoestring budget, using costumes and sets left over from other more lavish productions; Last Train From Bombay (Fred F. Sears, 1952), an exotic thriller; Fred F. Sears’ The 49th Man, an essay in Cold War atomic paranoia; and The Saracen Blade (William Castle, 1954), a rousing costume drama; and Castle’s The Iron Glove (1954), which starred Robert Stack in a Technicolor swashbuckler, done in typical Katzman fashion. In many respects, Katzman’s films proved an apt training ground for young directors; if you could work for Katzman and make something worthwhile, you could work for the majors, with their relaxed schedules, without a problem.
[edit] Katzman's Directors
Katzman’s directors were either on their way up, or trailing off at the end of their careers. Lew Landers, for example, was a holdover from the 1930s and 40s at Columbia, and was never anything more than a competent program director. Richard Quine, on the other hand, would go on to “A” features, most memorably with The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), which starred Judy Holliday and Paul Douglas, and established Quine’s career as a major Columbia director. Future horror director William Castle was still developing his own style as a director, and Katzman allowed Castle to cut his directorial teeth on a series of low-budget films.
But working for Katzman could be very tough indeed. On The Houston Story (1956), Castle was shooting on location in Texas, in August of 1955, when star Lee J. Cobb was felled with a non-fatal heart attack after three days of shooting. Katzman insisted that production continue, so Castle, who resembled Cobb’s general physical build, took over Cobb’s role, performing much of the action in long shot, with his back to the camera. This took another three days, and then the company returned to Hollywood. Castle hoped to finish up Cobb’s scenes after the actor recuperated, but Katzman instead cast actor Gene Barry in Cobb’s role, shot a few more days of film, and then released the production with Gene Barry as the star. In the final film, Cobb, Castle, and Barry played the leading role of “Frank Duncan” in various snippets of film; Katzman simply gave the material to his trusted editor, Edwin H. Bryant, and told him to patch it together. Surprisingly, no one noticed the difference.
Perhaps this was because the need for product was so intense. Katzman was more than willing to fill the public’s demand for genre entertainment, grinding out feature films at a torrential pace. New Orleans Uncensored (Castle, 1955) was a true crime drama, exposing the seamy underside of the Big Easy; Jungle Moon Men (Charles S. Gould, 1955) was yet another remake of Sir H. Rider Haggard’s classic novel She, starring Johnny Weissmuller. It Came From Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955) served primarily as a showcase for Ray Harryhausen’s superb stop-motion special effects; while Fred F. Sears’ Teen-Age Crime Wave (1955) was a surprisingly stark nod to the country’s new awareness of the problem of juvenile delinquency. Sears’ Rock Around the Clock (1956) was one of the first rock and roll movies to be released by a major studio, based upon Katzman’s intuition that rock music would soon be a major force in American culture; and Miami Exposé (Fred F. Sears, 1956) starred Lee J. Cobb in a neo-realist tale of big city corruption, with spirited support from Alan Napier and Edward Arnold.
[edit] Production of Don't Knock the Twist as Case Study
This is, of course, merely a sampling of the literally hundreds of films that Katzman produced for Columbia during the 1950s -- films that, with the exception of one or two ill-conceived projects, attracted the public’s attention, and reaped substantial returns at the box office. But precisely how did he create these films so quickly, getting them out to the public often within weeks of the events they fictively chronicled? An account of the production of Katzman’s 1962 Chubby Checker musical Don’t Knock the Twist, directed by Oscar Rudolph, offers a telling example. As an eyewitness observer reported:
“At 8:25 on the morning of Tuesday, January 30, 1962, Columbia Production No. 8657 went before the camera. Seven workdays later, the shooting would be finished. Twenty days after that, the picture would be edited, scored, and ready to take off to the nation’s movie houses. It would cost a total of $280,000. According to estimates by experts, it would gross at least four million.”
How did he do it? As Katzman noted of the film’s shooting schedule;“We’re shooting the big ones the first three days -- dance numbers, scenes with lots of people. Then we kill the musicians and most of the dancers and extras. Fourth day, we shoot the exteriors at the ranch, then we’re down to shooting the story, the dramatic stuff. After the fifth day we kill Chubby Checker, and the last two days we only need three principals, three character people, three bit players, and six extras, tops. We shoot the finale on the third day, and the opening scene on the last day, and nobody gets paid for just sitting.”
To the surprise of absolutely no one, the schedule went off like clock work, and the film was finished at 3:45 p.m. exactly seven days later, despite a weather disruption on the fifth day of shooting. Even though, by the end of the production, Oscar Rudolph’s direction to his performers consisted of little more than four phrases ceaselessly repeated, (“Roll it,” “Action,” “Thank you,” and “Print it”), the film was in the can, and a profitable release was assured.
[edit] Katzman as Trendsetter
As another example of Katzman’s topicality, he is often credited with the creation of the term “beatnik.” The varying rumors, which Katzman always encouraged, had him purchasing the term from Allen Ginsberg, picking the phrase up from the extras on one of his early rock and roll movies, creating the word to win a game of Scrabble, or perhaps just coming up with the term out of thin air. If Katzman did indeed create the term, it serves as a good example of his multi-genre worldview, in which each new social phenomenon was instantly recycled as a marketable commodity. Like everything else, it was grist for Katzman’s ceaselessly grinding cultural blender, which fused science fiction, rock and roll, crime thrillers and historical spectacles into a seamless generic construct.
[edit] Katzman and the Hollywood Blacklist
Katzman also made it a practice to employ screenwriters who were victims of the HUAC blacklist during the Cold War era. Many producers followed this practice, but Katzman, with his insatiable need for screenplays, was more deeply involved in using “blacklisted” talent than most. Blacklisted scenarist Bernard Gordon, for example, wrote Castle’s The Law vs. Billy The Kid (1954) as “John D. Williams,” as well as Sears’ Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), Edward L. Cahn’s Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), Leslie Kardos’ The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957), and Sears’ Escape from San Quentin (1957) as “Raymond T. Marcus,” all of which were produced by Katzman. For Katzman, the important thing was that a person did work reliably, efficiently, and inexpensively; if a writer fit these criteria, Katzman was interested. In all his films, Katzman created a sealed, hermetic universe, within which his characters could operate with generic impunity. There were no rules to break, because Katzman had created the rules, and with them, the concept of the genre “hot-wire,” (in which several genres are combined to create a new twist on an existing format, such as the comedy/western, the horror/musical, and the like). Using this concept to bring new life to existing, and often overused genres, Katzman created a cinematic vision that was his alone.
[edit] Katzman and Elvis Presley
As the 1960s continued, Katzman would make several films at MGM with the fading star Elvis Presley, including Gene Nelson’s Harum Scarum (1965), with a budget of $2,400,000 and an eighteen day schedule. Presley received $1,000,000, while the rest of the cast split a paltry $200,000; the rest of the budget went entirely to production costs. But the Elvis films did not reflect Katzman’s true approach to filmmaking. Whereas Twist Around the Clock, made just three years earlier, had cost a mere $280,000, now Katzman was forced to deal with a budget that was nearly ten times that amount. The fun, and the maverick vision that had brought Katzman to Hollywood, had vanished.
[edit] Katzman's Final Years
Katzman’s final films were marginal, and the assembly line production system that had served him so well now seemed out of step with the time. For the first time, Katzman was unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Mercifully, Katzman did not live far beyond his working years, and died on August 4, 1973, in Hollywood, the town he had known for most of his life. Even as he was buried, his films were being consigned to oblivion, but Katzman would never know this. Katzman’s films, once the most exploitable productions in the business, were suddenly out of date. Columbia shipped them off to the deep storage vaults, where they remain to this day. Most have never been released to DVD or VHS; even Sears’ Rock Around the Clock, arguably the cultural touchstone of a generation, is missing in action.
While it is true that many of Katzman’s films are cheap and shoddy, it is also true that at his best -- during his white hot-streak at Columbia during the 1950s -- Sam Katzman and his associates told the viewing public more about the dark side of the American Dream than most of us would care to admit. Katzman’s films caught a decade in crisis in a series of microcosmic films that accurately defined the pleasure, passions, and concerns of the Cold War era. The fact that Katzman’s films are not revived today is not really an index of their quality, or lack of it, but rather because their concerns belong to a vanished era; an era, however, that eerily mimics our own.
Katzman kept working up to his death at the age of seventy-two. He is interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Bibliography: Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
