Val Lewton (1904 - 1951)

BIOGRAPHY (PART 3)

Although the seven year contract with one of Hollywood's major players looked like a gift from Heaven, it quickly turned into a nightmare. Paramount balked at the idea of Lewton bringing his trusted unit with him and there was an emotional closing down party on the day that the RKO horror unit finally turned out the lights for the last time. The only person that Lewton was able to take to him to Paramount was his assistant, Verna De Mots.

Worse was to come however. On arrival at Paramount, Lewton was assigned to an adaptation of Charles Dickens' The Cricket and the Hearth, one of his favourite books. But the writing process dragged on for months and Paramount finally decided that the public wouldn't warm to Dickens and axed the production. This left Lewton in something of a quandary - in those days, the studios would offset a producer's ongoing salary against the budget of their films. Lewton had been working at Paramount for six months, drawing a salary all that time, and had nothing to show for it. He started to fear that his accumulated pay would soon be so great that it would break the budget of whatever film Paramount finally allowed him to make.

In desperation, Lewton sought out something - anything - that he could get off the ground quickly. In the script file he found My Own True Love, a romance based on Yolanda Forbes' novel Make You a Fine Wife. Finally, in the Spring of 1947, a Val Lewton film went into production at Paramount. The circumstances of its creation hadn't been ideal and the process of its production was even worse. The studio seemed hell bent on blocking everything that Lewton tried to do and he found it impossible to get approval on anything. Costs escalated, star Phyllis Calvert walked off the set over a line of dialogue she refused to say, forcing a costly three day shutdown, and the script was being rewritten as they went along. Predictably, it opened to poor reviews and even worse box office.

Trying to put the failure of My Own True Love behind him, Lewton began work preparing a comedy, The Sainted Sisters (1948), based on an unproduced play and intended as a vehicle for Betty Hutton and Diana Lynn, though that would eventually be assigned to William Russell with Veronica Lake and Joan Caulfield taking the lead roles.

There was one small glimmer of hope for Lewton. He'd long wanted to film a fictionalised biography of Lucrezia Borgia, The Mask of Lucrezia, and with Michael Hogan working on a script, Paramount proudly announced its imminent production in all the trade papers. Former RKO cronies Ardel Wray and Josef Mischel came in for a while to take a crack at the script - Wray and Mischel had been one of the many RKO acolytes to benefit from Lewton's move to Paramount, the producer recommending them to many of his new colleagues.

But the work the pair did on the Lucrezia script - which Lewton wanted to be a low-key study of her youth - failed to impress the Paramount brass who initially shelved the project. Lewton was unhappy with the decision and asked for permission to rework the screenplay himself. Although he was secretly starting to believe that after the My Own True Love disaster, he would never work at Paramount again, Lewton was surprised when the studio said yes.

Lewton remained enthusiastic about Lucrezia, especially when he found that he could change the emphasis of the story so that it revolved around the creation by Alfonso of Ferrara of the cannon that, in Lewton's words, "broke the middle ages" (from a letter to his mother and sister, written in January 1948 and reprinted in Joel E. Siegel's Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (1972), p.89). He was given a further boost when Paulette Goddard insisted that her final film for Paramount under her existing contract be A Mask For Lucrezia.

It was the break at Paramount that Lewton had been looking for. Goddard had script approval and as she was championing his project, the studio had little choice but to give it the green light. He was fully aware that the studio didn't want him on board as producer, so offered them a deal - A Mask For Lucrezia in exchange for a six month option on an adaptation of The Cricket and the Hearth written by Hugo Butler.

But instead of staying at Paramount, where he clearly wasn't wanted, Lewton had a revolutionary idea. With Butler, Robson, Mischel and writer Ted Strauss, he set about trying to create a truly independent production unit that would make its own films and rely on the big studios only for facilities and distribution, his team, including casts, working for deferred salaries.

Sadly, the plan came to nothing and In March 1948, Lewton left Paramount. The man who had done so much to save RKO from its financial woes and who had revitalized and revolutionised the American horror film spent four months without a job in a town that no longer seemed to want him.

In July 1948, he was offered a production gig at MGM, hired by Louis B. Meyer himself. But his first assignment, a remake of King Vidor 's 1924 film Wild Oranges, itself based on a novel by Joseph Hergesheimer, didn't exactly fill him with confidence. On 26 July, he wrote to his mother and sister, telling them that "I ran the old picture and it looks very dated and very bad today. Also a re-examination of the values and motivations of the novel itself distressed me." In the same letter, reprinted in Siegel (p.93), he painted a sombre portrait of Hollywood in decline: "Hollywood is in a hell of a state. RKO is practically closed down; Universal is on the verge of bankruptcy and has cut down to less than a third of its usual staff... The only place where there seems to be any hope whatsoever is at M-G-M. I suppose I am very lucky to be there, even with such a drastically reduced salary."

It was against this despairing backdrop that Lewton's career at MGM began. And the sense of impending doom that informs Lewton's letter was not without foundation. By the beginning of 1949, Lewton still hadn't managed to get the Wild Oranges project off the ground. Dore Schary, who had taken over as head of production at the studio in September 1948, tried to get Lewton to merge his script with one that he had written, but Lewton was unimpressed. The film was never made.

Things again looked bleak for Lewton, but his career got a modest boost from an unexpected quarter. As Wild Oranges was finally unravelling, Life reporter James Agee was visiting MGM to write his now-famous article on John Huston, who was working for the studio at the time. Over lunch with Schary, Agee noted, almost in passing, that Schary had on the payroll "One of the three greatest moviemakers this country ever produced" and he was astonished to learn that Agee was referring to Lewton.

Intrigued, Schary called into Lewton's office later that same day to tell him what Agee had said. It was a small crumb of comfort for Lewton who had meanwhile been assigned to a lightweight Norman Taurog comedy, Please Believe Me, starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Walker.

Of more relevance to Lewton - who simply lost interest in the Taurog film - was the news that Mark Robson and Robert Wise, who had both gone on to enjoy successful careers after leaving Lewton's RKO horror unit, wanted to work with him again. Fired with enthusiasm, he set up Aspen Productions to allow both directors to make one film each. Together, they started cooking up an ambitious story about Civil Rights but it soon became clear that the script was in trouble. No matter how hard each of these incredibly talented film-makers worked on it, they couldn't get it into any kind of workable shape. Lewton wanted to abandon the project and try something else, but Robson insisted on continuing trying to iron out the wrinkles.

What should have been a happy reunion with his protégés, and what could have been one of the greatest American films of the late 1940s, ended when Lewton received word that he was being dropped from Aspen, to be replaced by new producer Thoren Warth. Deeply hurt and feeling betrayed by people whose careers he'd helped to nurture, Lewton succumbed to a terrible depression.

While Aspen went on to make two commercial flops, Robson's Return to Paradise (1953) and Wise's The Captive City (1952), Lewton went back to MGM where he tried to nurse his wounds. In the summer of 1949, his contract up, Lewton again found himself out of work and his depression deepened. Ruth, fearing for her husband's sanity, insisted that he called up his old mentor David Selznick and ask for help. Selznick found him work but Lewton was also being pursued by Universal.

The studio were specifically interested in his script for the Revolutionary War drama, Ticonderoga, which he'd been developing at MGM and which he'd been working on to keep himself busy in the meantime. Desperate for work, Lewton accepted a job at Universal that paid even less than the gig at MGM - the money scarcely seemed to matter, he just wanted to work.

There's a horrible inevitability about the fact that, despite their initial interest, Universal eventually passed on Ticonderoga. Instead, they gave Lewton a Western novel, Stand at Spanish Boot by Harry Brown which he developed as a script titled War Dance and eventually produced as Apache Drums (1951). It cost just $395,000 and in a letter to his mother and sister (again reprinted in Siegel, pp.97-98), he claimed that it was the cheapest Technicolor film ever produced with "real actors. Columbia made one with a horse for slightly less money."

Though it was all a far cry from his glory days at RKO, this was the happiest that Lewton had been for years. Universal shared many of the less formal qualities of the RKO unit and Lewton quickly rediscovered the thrills and freedoms of working with lower budgets on films that weren't seen as great works so attracted less interference from the studio.

For some time, Lewton had been friends with a young producer's assistant named Stanley Kramer. The two shared a passion for both literature and film and would talk endlessly about which books they'd like to adapt and which films they'd like to make. When Kramer became a producer, Lewton persuaded him to tackle an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), one of the projects they'd often fantasized about.

Kramer was soon making a name for himself at United Artists and was lured away to Columbia with a contract to produce six films a year. It was a daunting schedule, one that Kramer quickly realised that he couldn't keep pace with on his own. To help with the workload, Kramer decided that he needed some co-producers and set about assembling a team of newcomers and old-hands who had fallen out of favour with mainstream Hollywood. One of them was Lewton, who was offered three film a year with Kramer acting as executive producer - The Fourposter, Member of the Wedding and Death of a Salesman. It was tough decision to make - Lewton was happy at Universal, but the chance to work with Kramer was just too tempting.

Apache Drums was given a successful preview screening in December 1950, but that same night, Lewton was taken to hospital in great pain and it was found that he had gallstones and was prescribed morphine. Despite his illness, Lewton went ahead and left Universal, spending some time resting at home. On a trip to Ensenada in Mexico, he again had a gallstone attack.

Things were about to get even worse: on returning to Hollywood, Lewton found that the terms of the Kramer deal had changed, and not in his favour. Instead of the promised well-paid work as a producer, he was now going to receive a reduced salary and only an assistant producer credit. It didn't seem to dampen Lewton's enthusiasm for the projects all that much - again, he was just very thankful to be working.

While preparing the first of the Kramer films, My Six Convicts, he suffered a second heart attack and was confined to bed. He remained undaunted and just two days later was screening Bedlam to the writer who was working on the Convicts screenplay. But that same night, Ruth slipped on a loose rug and, alerted by her startled scream, Lewton rushed to help her. He suffered another heart attack and this time his doctor insisted that he would have to spend some time in hospital. He was placed in an oxygen tent and spent a distressing, uncomfortable week complaining about feeling claustrophobic and trapped. On 14 March 1951, Val Lewton died, aged just 46.

At his funeral, attended by the many talented friends whose careers he'd nurtured over the years, long-time friend, actor Alan Napier, delivered a hard-hitting and heartfelt eulogy attacking the Hollywood system for the way it had so poorly treated one of its most talented producers.
KEVIN LYONS

...previous

Last Updated: 1 January, 2009