Hannah Weinstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hannah Weinstein (b. Hannah Dorner, New York, June 23, 1911. d. New York, March 9, 1984) was an American journalist, publicist and left-wing political activist who moved to Britain and became a television producer. She is best known for producing The Adventures of Robin Hood television series in the 1950s.
Mother of film producer Paula Weinstein.
She worked for the New York Herald Tribune starting in 1927. In 1937, she joined Fiorello H. La Guardia's New York mayoral campaign. She was also involved in the presidential campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Wallace.
In 1952, she moved to London to avoid the anti-Communist persecution and McCarthyism sweeping the US in the early 1950s. There she established her own movie production company, Sapphire Films.
When the first commercial television network (ITV) was established in Britain in the mid-1950's, she created and produced The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59), starring Richard Greene. The series was sold to both British and American television through ITC Entertainment.
Weinstein hired American writers who had been blacklisted by the McCarthy Communist hearings (Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter and others), using pseudonyms, and instituted elaborate security measures to ensure that the writers' true identities remained secret. The script writers no doubt could empathize when writing about Robin Hood's problems with the Sheriff of Nottingham.
The success of Robin Hood led Weinstein to create more television series, including The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57), The Buccaneers (1956-57), The Adventures of William Tell (1958-59) and Sword of Freedom (1958-60). Other television producers joined in the swashbuckler genre, making these shows the British equivalent of American westerns.
Weinstein returned to America in 1962, and resumed her involvement in politics.
In 1971 she founded the Third World Cinema Corporation to produce films with members of African-American groups. In 1974, she produced the Oscar nominated film Claudine, featuring an all-black cast in a story about an afro-american family struggling through hard time and racism. She later produced Greased Lightning (1977) and Stir Crazy (1980) starring comedian Richard Pryor.
In 1982, she received the Women in Film Life Achievement Award and in 1984, was named for the Liberty Hill Award in honor of her artistic and political accomplishments.
