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 40 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 1930s, his Bela Lugosi and East Side Kids features of the 1940s, the 15-chapter Superman serial of 1948, and a string of rock-'n'-roll musicals in the 1950s. At MGM Studios in the 1960s, Katzman produced several Elvis Presley films and singer Roy Orbison's only film, The Fastest Guitar Alive.
[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 an errand boy at 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.
Fox let Katzman go in a wave of cutbacks just before the company merged with 20th Century Pictures. Sam Katzman thus became an independent producer and created his first venture, a feature-length film, His Private Secretary (1933), which he wrote himself. John Wayne was featured in the picture, which Sam made in six days at an overall cost of $13,000. From this modest beginning, Katzman never looked back.
Low-budget producers usually made outdoor westerns and action pictures, saving money on sets and using inexpensive actors. Katzman was no exception, and he filled his films with former silent-screen players who still had name value but commanded lower salaries. His companies of the late 1930s, Victory Pictures (1935-1939) and Puritan Pictures (1935-1938), relied on screen menace Bela Lugosi, cowboy star Tim McCoy, and Olympic athlete Herman Brix to draw the customers.
[edit] Katzman joins Monogram Pictures
Monogram Pictures, a small but prolific independent studio, specialized in low-budget films for neighborhood theaters. Monogram manufactured much of its own product, but also released films made by independent producers. Sam Katzman sold Monogram on a juvenile-delinquency series, to cash in on the successful cycle of Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys melodramas. Katzman's series, The East Side Kids, caught on almost immediately, and before long many of the original Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys joined Katzman's series. The East Side Kids films gradually evolved from noisy melodramas to roughneck comedies. Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Billy Benedict, and Ernie 'Sunshine' Sammy Morrison were mainstays of Katzman's East Side troupe.
Katzman branched out with companion series for Monogram. He partnered with Jack Dietz to produce Bela Lugosi thrillers, and comedy features with Harry Langdon, Billy Gilbert, and Shemp Howard.
When Leo Gorcey demanded double his weekly salary from Katzman in 1945, Katzman refused and pulled the plug on The East Side Kids. He then approached Monogram with an idea at the opposite extreme: the wholesome adventures of squeaky-clean high school kids. Monogram agreed, and Katzman launched the "Teen Agers" series, featuring singer Freddie Stewart and future "Superman" co-star Noel Neill.
[edit] Katzman moves from Monogram to Columbia
In 1945 Katzman accepted a contract from Columbia Pictures to produce adventure serials and, soon after, feature films. For two years he worked for both Monogram and Columbia, grinding out serials and low-budget features at a truly torrential pace. In 1947 he joined Columbia full-time, with a series of four Jean Porter musical comedies and another two Gloria Jean vehicles. In 1949 he hired Olympic hero and movie Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller (who had been replaced by Lex Barker in the RKO Tarzan films) for a series of Jungle Jim adventures, earning Katzman the nickname "Jungle Sam". By 1955 Columbia turned Jungle Jim into a television property, and legalities prevented Columbia from making any more Jungle Jims for theaters, Katzman simply shrugged off the "Jungle Jim" character and had Johnny Weissmuller use his own name in three more features. The last one, Jungle Moon Men (Charles S. Gould, 1955), was yet another remake of Sir H. Rider Haggard’s classic novel "She." (After Katzman stopped making the features, Weissmuller starred in 39 "Jungle Jim" TV episodes.)
Sam Katzman revitalized the waning serial market with his 1948 production Superman, starring Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel, and erstwhile "Teen Agers" actress Noel Neill as Lois Lane. The 15-chapter cliffhanger was tremendously successful, spawning two more superhero serials, Batman and Robin (1949) and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950). Katzman continued to produce serials until 1956; his Blazing the Overland Trail (a very-low-budget patchwork of old stock footage and new scenes, with the actors costumed to match three serial heroes of the 1940s!) rang down the curtain on the serial genre. (Columbia would reissue Katzman's serials through 1965.)
Katzman was a master at taking a major news story, popular trend, or musical craze and making a film about it. He worked so quickly that the film could play theaters while the topic was still hot, ensuring big profits. One of his first pictures of this type was 1948's I Surrender Dear, cashing in on the new disc-jockey phenomenon in broadcasting. He used elements from this picture as a blueprint for his later rock-and-roll musical hit, Rock Around the Clock.
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 director William Berke’s Mark of the Gorilla, Katzman proved himself a master of all genres, with such films as Lew Landers’s 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, 1950); 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), covering the then-escalating conflict), Richard Quine’s wartime drama Purple Heart Diary ](1951); 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.
Columbia sometimes used the Sam Katzman unit as a threat. When Columbia president Harry Cohn wanted to break an actor's contract, he gave the actor a Katzman script. Everyone knew Katzman as a "schlock" producer, and Cohn knew full well that the actor would refuse the lowbrow script, giving Cohn cause to terminate the contract without penalty. This ploy backfired in 1951 when Cohn owed Lucille Ball $85,000 and one feature film. He sent Ball the script of a formula Arabian Nights fantasy, The Magic Carpet, confident that Ball would decline. Ball recounted her next move in her memoir, "Love, Lucy": "I had never feuded with a studio before and I wasn't about to earn the reputation of being difficult at this late date. I picked up the phone and called Harry Cohn. 'I've just read the Sam Katzman script,' I crooned into his ear. 'I think it's marvelous! I'd be delighted to do it.' 'You would?' Mr. Cohn almost fell over backward and poor Sam Katzman just about had a coronary... My salary ate up half Katzman's budget." Undaunted, Katzman and Columbia house director Lew Landers made the film in color, using costumes and sets left over from other, more lavish productions;
[edit] Katzman's Directors
Katzman’s directors were either on their way up, or trailing off at the end of their careers. Studio veterans Arthur Dreifuss, Lew Landers. and William Berke were good, workmanlike directors, and old hands at directing "B" comedies, musicals, and mysteries. Serial specialist Spencer Gordon Bennet, whose career went back to the silent-film days, speedily churned out action fare for Katzman. 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. Fred F. Sears was a former actor in Columbia "B" pictures, who assisted behind the scenes on Katzman's serials, and was promoted to full-fledged director.
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.
New Orleans Uncensored (Castle, 1955) was a true-crime drama, exposing the seamy underside of the Big Easy; 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-'n'-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 clockwork, 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 molded science fiction, rock-'n'-roll, crime thriller, and historical spectacle into a generic, foolproof formula.
[edit] Katzman and the Hollywood Blacklist
Katzman also made it a practice to employ screenwriters who were victims of the House Un-American Committee 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 worked 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 18-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 10 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 times. For the first time, Katzman was unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Katzman died on August 4, 1973, in Hollywood, the town he had known for most of his life.
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 American Dream (and its dark side) 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.
Katzman kept working up to his death at the age of 72. He is interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
[edit] Further reading
Bibliography: Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
