23 Facts About Val Lewton

Val Lewton was a Russian-American novelist, film producer and screenwriter best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s.

Val Lewton's son, named Val Lewton, was a painter and exhibition designer.

Val Lewton began his career as a writer, producing novels, including the best-selling pulp novel No Bed of Her Own.

Val Lewton worked as a writer and publicist for MGM before being named head of RKO's horror unit in 1942.

Val Lewton produced several successful films, often writing the final draft of the screenplays himself.

Val Lewton gave first directing opportunities to Robert Wise and Mark Robson and worked with Boris Karloff, who credited Lewton with saving his career.

Val Lewton was born Volodymyr Ivanovich Hofschneider or Leventon in Yalta, Imperial Russia, in 1904.

Val Lewton was of Jewish descent, the son of moneylender Max Hofschneider and Anna "Nina" Leventon, a pharmacist's daughter.

Val Lewton's mother left his father and moved to Berlin, taking their two children with her.

Val Lewton was naturalized as a US citizen in a federal court in Los Angeles as Wladimir Ivan Lewton in June 1941.

In 1920, when Val Lewton was 16, he lost his job as a society 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.

Val Lewton went on to study journalism at Columbia University and authored 18 works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.

In 1933, Val Lewton clandestinely published Grushenka: Three Times a Woman, an erotic novel whose publication would have subjected Val Lewton to criminal penalties given the mores of the time.

Val Lewton worked as a writer at MGM's publicity office in New York City, providing novelizations of popular movies for serialization in magazines, which were sometimes later collected into book form.

Val Lewton quit this position after the success of No Bed of Her Own, but when three later novels that same year failed to succeed, he journeyed to Hollywood for a job writing a screen treatment of Gogol's Taras Bulba for David O Selznick.

Val Lewton 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.

Val Lewton worked for Selznick as a story editor, a scout for discovering literary properties for Selznick's studio, and a go-between with the Hollywood censorship system.

In 1942, Val Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO studios at a salary of US$250 per week.

Val Lewton would have to follow three rules: each film had to come in under a US$150,000 budget, each was to run under 75 minutes, and Lewton's supervisors would supply the film titles.

Val Lewton always wrote the final draft of the screenplays for his films, but avoided on-screen co-writing credits except in two cases, The Body Snatcher and Bedlam, for which he used the pseudonym "Carlos Keith," which he had previously used for the novels 4 Wives, A Laughing Woman, This Fool, Passion, and Where the Cobra Sings.

Val Lewton spent time at home working on a screenplay about the famous American Revolutionary War battles at Fort Ticonderoga.

Universal Studios made an offer on the work, and though the screenplay was not used, Val Lewton was given producer duties on the film Apache Drums, released in 1951.

Val Lewton resigned at Universal and began preparation to work on the film My Six Convicts, but after suffering gallstone problems, he had the first of two heart attacks which weakened him so much that he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1951 at the age of 46.