Val Lewton

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Val Lewton

Vladimir Ivan Leventon (7 May, 1904-14 March, 1951) was an American screenwriter and producer who was born in what is now Yalta, Ukraine. He was a nephew of the actress Alla Nazimova. In 1909, he immigrated to the USA with his sister and mother (where his name was changed to Val Lewton). He was raised in suburban Port Chester, New York.

Prior to beginning his film career in the early 1930s (as an MGM publicist and assistant to David O. Selznick), 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, with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. 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. He was paid $250 a week. And 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, with Simone Simon. Made for $134,000, the film went on to earn nearly $4 million, and was the top moneymaker for RKO that year.

Lewton died of a heart attack on March 14, 1951, at the age of 46.

[edit] Val Lewton's RKO Films

Cat People (1942)
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
The Leopard Man (1943) based on the novel 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)
Isle of the Dead (1945)
Bedlam (1946)

In two cases (The Body Snatcher and Bedlam) Lewton also accepted co-writing credit, but used the pseudonym "Carlos Keith" in the films' credits. He also wrote a novel, Where the Cobra Sings under the Carlos Keith pen name.