Joseph E. Levine

Joseph E. Levine
Joseph Levine and Cathy Ryan, widow of Cornelius Ryan, announcing the production of A Bridge Too Far in 1975.
Born	Joseph Edward Levine (1905-09-09)September 9, 1905 Boston, Massachusetts
Died	July 31, 1987(1987-07-31) (aged 81) Greenwich, Connecticut

Joseph Edward Levine (September 9, 1905 – July 31, 1987) was an American film producer. At the time of his death it was said he was involved in 497 movies as a producer, distributor or financier. These included The Lion in Winter, The Night Porter, The Producers, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge; he was also responsible for the US releases of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! and Hercules, which helped revolutionize film marketing.

Levine was born in a slum in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 9, 1905. The youngest of six children of a Russian-Jewish immigrant tailor, Joe did whatever work he could to help support his mother, a widow who had remarried only to have her second husband abandon her. This led Joe (in his later years) to tell an interviewer that he had known (in his words) "not one happy day" growing up. At 14 years of age he was hired for full-time work in a dress factory and left school, never to re-enroll.

In the 1920s in partnership with two of his older brothers, Joe opened a basement dress shop, whose stock the Levine brothers obtained on consignment. Nan Robertson's obituary of him for the New York Times notes that he "briefly drove an ambulance, manufactured little statues of Daddy Grace, a black evangelist, and operated the Cafe Wonderbar in Boston's Back Bay" during this period and during the early and middle 1930s.

In 1937, Levine encountered Rosalie Harrison, then a singer with Rudy Vallee's band, and left the restaurant business for her; within a week of their engagement, at Harrison's insistence, Levine sold the Cafe Wonderbar. They married the following year and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Joe bought, and commenced to run, a movie house. Eventually, he became a successful, if small-time, distributor and exhibitor throughout New England, buying "decrepit" Westerns at low rates for his movie houses.
One of Levine's most unusual successes was Body Beautiful, a sex-hygiene film which he saw drawing a line of prospective ticket-buyers who were braving a snowstorm to that end. He later remembered buying it to show in his theaters because "it made me sick."