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Topic: Val Lewton

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	Val Lewton - No Bed Of Her Own
		“Val Lewton is one of the great, relatively unsung heroes of film history, and the wonderfully inventive, beautifully poetic and deeply unsettling films he made as a producer at RKO are some of the greatest treasures we have.
		Val Lewton's novel from 1932 slipped off the radar in the latter part of the 20th Century, which is a shame because it's an absolute gem.
		Val Lewton – the visionary RKO producer behind Cat People (1942) and a whole host of weird, unsettling horror movies that warped the constraints of the genre – bashed out his novel No Bed Of Her Own while the Depression was still dragging the USA down.
	www.kinglybooks.com /lewton.htm (1776 words)

	Val Lewton [1904 - 1951] - Part 2 @ EOFFTV (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Lewton would be given the titles for the films but he would be allowed to do more or less what he wanted, so long as used the title and played by the rules.
		On Lewton's recommendation, Bodeen was borrowed from RKO [where he was employed as a reader in the story department] and put to work as a research assistant for Aldous Huxley, who was working on the script.
		Lewton and Bodeen struck up a friendship and, when Lewton departed Selznick for RKO, two weeks before Bodeen was due to return, he promised the writer that he would take him on at his new unit.
	www.eofftv.com /names/l/lew/lewton_val_main2.htm (1454 words)

	Val Lewton Papers (Library of Congress)
		The papers of Val Lewton, motion picture producer, screenwriter, and novelist, were given to the Library of Congress by his son, Val Edwin Lewton, in 1992.
		Lewton was hired to do the treatment (never filmed) and moved to California, working as Selznick's story editor and assistant until 1942, when he was offered a position as head of the new horror unit at RKO Radio Pictures.
		Lewton's output as head of the horror unit of RKO is represented primarily in the writings by a bound set of final scripts of the eleven films he produced at that studio with directors Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and Mark Robson, beginning with Cat People in 1942.
	www.loc.gov /rr/mss/text/lewton.html (1019 words)

	Val Lewton [1904 - 1951] - Part 3 @ EOFFTV
		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.
		Lewton had been working at Paramount for six months, drawing a salary all that time, and had nothing to show for it.
		Lewton was unhappy with the decision and asked for permission to rework the screenplay himself.
	www.eofftv.com /names/l/lew/lewton_val_main3.htm (2106 words)

	Fear Itself: Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship
		Limned by Lewton and his retinue with the compact complexity of an engraving, Captain Stone is the archetype of a horror not merely psychological, but spiritual: Saturn devouring his children.
		Lewton’s surpassing achievement in Stone is to realise the humanity, the vulnerability of this implicitly terrifying figure; with no perceptible contradiction between the humanity and the horror.
		Lewton bypasses the orthodox flummery of the horror genre to see and realise the fl cavity of metaphysical fear; the nucleus of authentic horror.
	www.rouge.com.au /8/lewton.html (2969 words)

	Val Lewton (1904 - 1951) Ephemera
		Val was the only producer, in the American sense of the word, to whom the credit Producer really applied.
		Lewton's films were easily identifiable by their attention to detail, their unusually literate screenplays, their skillful, suggestive use of shadow and sound...
		Lewton contributed a great deal to the screenplays of his films, from the original story-lines, which were often his, through the various drafts and revisions; and he always wrote the final shooting scripts himself."
	eeweems.com /val_lewton/articles_ephemera.html (740 words)

	allmovie ((( Val Lewton > Overview )))
		A Columbia University graduate and former writer, Val Lewton first made a name for himself in films as an assistant to David O. Selznick in the 1930s, and co-directed the Bastille scene in A Tale of Two Cities (1938).
		Lewton hoped to move into A-pictures, but his slightly higher budgeted Bedlam (1945) failed to make as much money as was hoped, and he was told to continue with smaller scale films.
		Lewton died of a heart attack in 1951 while trying to revive his career.
	allmovie.com /cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B99671 (176 words)

	BeatRoute Magazine - Archives - DVD - Val Lewton
		Lewton had the benefit of Karloff’s star power, and through the course of the next few films, Karloff was able to demonstrate his dynamic range as an actor.
		Lewton wrote the screenplay himself for the feature and the dialogue exchanges between Gray and Dr. McFarlane (Henry Daneill) are some of the best verbal sparring matches in horror film history, the depths of which were scarcely even touched upon by the ‘Grade A’ pictures of the same time period.
		Throughout these nine films, Val Lewton created and codified a new form of horror – one not based upon frightening creatures or external forces, but a form of horror that shines a dark mirror inwards towards that veiled and contained side in all of us.
	www.beatroute.ca /view_archived_article.php?id=22§ionID=11&articleID=473 (1720 words)

	The Subtle Shockers Of Val Lewton--Part One
		The legendary producer was impressed with Lewton’s strong sense of story structure, and it was Lewton’s association with Selznick that brought him to the attention of the executives at RKO Studios.
		Lewton, however, refused, feeling such a move could be considered an admission of guilt on his part.
		Val Lewton certainly brought a new scope to the traditional horror film, one that used suggestion and mood to heighten the fright.
	www.horror-wood.com /lewton.htm (2850 words)

	“Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures” by Alexander Nemerov
		Lewton’s singular tension between iconic stasis and filmic mobility is highly significant for Nemerov, who identifies the repeated imagery of immobilised figures as recurring and specific to Lewton’s productions.
		Val used to say that the audience is the most important actor in the theatre, if you give it a chance.
		This is no mere task, given that Lewton is one producer who, even in the forties, was lauded time and time again as a B-movie virtuoso and still continues to inspire critical discussion (4).
	www.sensesofcinema.com /contents/books/06/41/icons-grief-val-lewton.html (1293 words)

	Val Lewton - Search Results - MSN Encarta
		Val Lewton - Search Results - MSN Encarta
		Lewton, Val (1904–1951), pseudonym of Vladimir Ivan Leventon, Russian-born American film producer, who was responsible for a series of atmospheric...
		Fitch, Val Logsdon, born in 1923, American experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner.
	ca.encarta.msn.com /Val_Lewton.html (137 words)

	The Subtle Shockers Of Val Lewton, Part Two (Site not responding. Last check: )
		But the filmmaking freedom Lewton had found at RKO was not to be had at Paramount, and the producer found himself at the mercy of studio politics once again.
		Val Lewton’s name no longer appeared on films, but his influence was certainly still felt in them.
		While Val Lewton longed to do more "prestigious" pictures, to most film fans and critics alike he will always be remembered for a handful of horror movies made from 1942 to 1945…three brief years that left Lewton with cinematic immortality and fans of the fantastique with endless hours of entertainment.
	horror-wood.com /val_lewton.htm (2519 words)

	Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005) (V) (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Val Lewton was a producer that produced a group of atmospherically charged, elegantly filmed, subtly contexed films from a period roughly from 1942 to 1945 or so.
		RKO would give Lewton a title and he would assemble the script, the director, the crew team, the actors, and then blend them all together to make not only viable box office hits but some of the most powerfully symbolic, metaphorical, suggestive horror films ever made.
		Val Lewton's son is on hand to probably give the best insights into the world of his father.
	us.imdb.com /title/tt0475144 (476 words)

	Val Lewton Collection (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Legendary horror producer Val Lewton had worked for several years as story editor and general factotum for David O. Selznick before the desire for more creative opportunities led him to RKO, where he was put in charge of the financially beleaguered studio's horror unit.
		Lewton was given a list of pre-tested, lurid titles from which he was to choose and write a story around (though he would employ other writers, the final screenplays were always the direct work of Lewton himself).
		RKO would be so astounded by the returns on Lewton's first effort that they would immediately ask for a sequel (though four more of Lewton's films would be completed and released before it).
	www.classicsondvd.com /vallewtoncollection.htm (1526 words)

	The prince of Poverty Row \| Features \| guardian.co.uk Film
		Val Lewton was born Vladimir Ivan Leventon in Yalta, Russia, in 1904.
		Lewton was signed on to produce a series of low-budget horror films and the rest is history.
		Lewton's nuanced, cultured scary pictures of the 1940s were championed by James Agee, who lauded Lewton's work in his film commentaries in Time and the Nation.
	film.guardian.co.uk /features/featurepages/0,,1748543,00.html (1006 words)

	Val Lewton (1904 - 1951)
		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 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO studios.
		Producer Val Lewton masterminded some very effective horror films for RKO during the Forties; working closely with talented directors like Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise, Lewton made a string of low-budget atmospheric gems that have become horror classics.
	www.jahsonic.com /ValLewton.html (1068 words)

	Amazon.ca: The Val Lewton Horror Collection (Cat People / The Curse of the Cat People / I Walked with a Zombie / The ...
		Val Lewton's name is synonymous with the subtlest, most mysterious brand of horror filmmaking in Hollywood's golden age, and the nine horror classics he produced at RKO between 1942 and 1946 constitute the most remarkable cycle of creativity in B-movie history.
		Although on one level this is the Lewton film that veers closest to conventional mystery-suspense, there's no end of unsettling ambiguity (another fl panther on the loose!) and hints of occultism and religious mania.
		Produced by Val Lewton (7 May 1904, Yalta, Crimea, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)) whose story telling device is unique in that this is more of a psychological film that does not focus on any one person as they are all pawns in a much larger story.
	www.amazon.ca /Collection-Snatcher-Leopard-Seventh-Shadows/dp/B000A0GOEQ (2599 words)

	Val Lewton - Arts and Faith
		Lewton and Tourneur actually came out of the system--Lewton came out of the Hollywood script department (he had worked on Gone With the Wind and Rebecca) and Tourneur's father was an esteemed French filmmaker from the silent era.
		Lewton's films bear many stylistic and thematic similarities regardless of the director: noir lighting; suspenseful "walking scenes"; doomed romanticism; a careful tension between rationality and the supernatural, the seen and the unseen.
		Lewton may well have been the chief creative voice on these projects, but he definitely enjoyed the talents of these other artists (who often produced notable non-Lewton work).
	artsandfaith.com /index.php?showtopic=7050&view=getnewpost (3068 words)

	Movie Music UK — Music for the Films of Val Lewton — Roy Webb
		Golden Age Review by Tom Kiefner: Val Lewton produced for RKO pictures a series of films in the early to middle forties to compete with the huge success Universal had experienced with their horror films.
		Val, an excellent story editor for Selznick studios, was hired away specifically to produce and compete against Universal.
		Val was a sensitive intellectual who as history would show produced not "horror films" but extremely well thought out psychological dramas.
	www.moviemusicuk.us /vallewtoncd.htm (941 words)

	Metroactive Movies \| Val Lewton
		Lewton was reputed to be terrified of the beasts.
		It's Lewton's sense of sadness and loss that makes his films resonant, as resonant as the unaccompanied voices of the singers he used in virtually all of his movies.
		Lewton's work stands in opposition to the modern horror film, where all the characters get what's coming to them--those popular horror comedies that are fool's parades into the slaughterhouse.
	www.metroactive.com /papers/metro/11.02.00/lewton-0044.html (1575 words)

	Slant Magazine - DVD Review: The Val Lewton Horror Collection
		Lewton's contemplation of multi-cultural conflict is also felt throughout Tourneur's masterpieces The Leopard Man and I Walked With a Zombie.
		Not only did RKO hire Lewton to save the company from the financial disaster brought on by Welles's Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, but when Tourneur graduated to making A pictures Lewton chose to collaborate with Robson and Wise, both of whom were responsible for editing Welles's two most enduring classics.
		Lewton was an avid reader with a big sense of humor and a great appreciation for art, and though he never directed a film, if he had it might have looked and sounded a little like this one.
	www.slantmagazine.com /dvd/dvd_review.asp?ID=764 (1498 words)

	VAL LEWTON PAGES
		His name was naturalized to "Val Lewton" at the suggestion of his aunt, the actress Alla Nazimova, with whom Lewton and his mother and sister sometimes lived.
		Lewton worked as a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, producing at least eight novels.
		Lewton enjoyed the California climate, where he pursued boating, his journals and scrap letters filled with knotting diagrams for his sail boat, supply lists, and notes for improvements and repairs to be made to his boat he named The Nina, after his mother.
	www.geocities.com /lewtonsite (643 words)

	The Val Lewton Horror Collection
		Lewton's name is synonymous with oblique diabolical wickedness and spine chilling horror -- most of it is kept tempered behind locked doors, heavy fog banks or mysterious dark corridors.
		Once again, Lewton charms us into a nightmare of Satanic rituals, making the improbable seem dangerously close to the truth, while creating a level of audience discomfort that is hard to shake afterward.
		Lewton tries to mask the absence of a good strong narrative (something his previous films had) with much more atmosphere than is actually necessary.
	www.mediascreen.com /v/vallewtonhorrorcollection.htm (1644 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - DVD, Movie, Video: Val Lewton Horror Collection, Val Lewton, DVD, Slip Sleeve / ...
		Lewton and his team excelled at making the commonplace menacing, as when a cozy New York neighborhood became home to a devil-worshiping cult in 1943's The Seventh Victim or a dusty New Mexico town became a killing field in The Leopard Man (made in the same year).
		Lewton teamed horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a neatly scripted adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher (1945) and even filtered the terrors of Curse of the Cat People (1944) through the imagination of a scared child.
		Val Lewton (writing under the pseudonym Carlos Keith) based his film on one of the illustrations in Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress," glimpses of which are seen throughout the film as transitional devices.
	video.barnesandnoble.com /search/product.asp?EAN=53939727029&userid=kB2G5Z0CD3&cds2Pid=322&linkid=526374 (1712 words)

	How Val Lewton Made Horror Movies Into Fine Art - October 11, 2005 - The New York Sun
		A protege of David O. Selznick and prolific pulp fiction writer who immersed himself in the higher frequencies of the arts, Lewton was given a free hand as long as he accepted a few stipulations: small budgets, abbreviated running times, horrific subjects, and titles mandated by the studio before the films were conceived.
		In the early 1930s, the sexual fantasies and fears of male adolescents were dramatized in the immaculate conception of "Frankenstein," the neck-hickeys of "Dracula," and the smirking invincibility of "The Invisible Man." Lewton's films march to a drumroll of mother-daughter disorders, sisterhood crises, sexual assertion and repression, lesbianism, romance, loneliness, vulnerability, and suicide.
		In Lewton, water affords protection - a magic circle, as in the swimming pool in "Cat People" or the ocean in "I Walked With a Zombie." The closing shot of "The Seventh Victim," involving a chair and a consumptive neighbor (named Mimi, what else?), is devastating and, even after 60 years, too good to spoil.
	www.nysun.com /article/21282 (765 words)

	val lewton
		In ten years, Lewton produced 14 films that elevated B-horror flicks into sublime studies in terror.
		Lewton worked around his limits; he thought the chills could be twice as effective if left to the audience's imagination.
		Lewton was a rare breed of film maker who made due with the available resources, and went on to prove himself a master of horror on a small scale.
	alt.tcm.turner.com /MONTH_SPOTS/99/01/val_lewton.htm (567 words)

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