Val Lewton
| Val Lewton | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon May 7, 1904 Yalta, Imperial Russia (now in Ukraine) |
| Died | March 14, 1951 (aged 46) Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, film producer, screenwriter |
| Years active | 1932–1951 |
| Spouse(s) | Ruth Knapp |
Val Lewton (May 7, 1904 – March 14, 1951) 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.
Lewton was born Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon (Russian: Владимир Иванович Левентон, Ukrainian: Володимир Іванович Левентон) in Yalta, Imperial Russia (now in Ukraine), in 1904. He was of Jewish descent, the son of moneylender Max Hofschneider and Nina Leventon, a pharmacist's daughter. The family converted to Christianity. He was nephew of actress Alla Nazimova.
His mother left his father and moved to Berlin, taking her children with her. In 1909, they emigrated to the United States, where his name was changed to Val Lewton. He was raised in suburban Port Chester, New York.
In 1920, when 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. He went on to study journalism at Columbia University and authored eighteen works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
In 1932, he wrote the best-selling pulp novel No Bed of Her Own, which was later used for the film No Man of Her Own, with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.
Lewton worked as a writer for the New York City MGM in Alice Roberts publicity office, providing novelizations of popular movies for serialization in magazines, which were sometimes later collected into book form. He also wrote promotional copy. He quit this position after the success of his 1932 novel No Bed of Her Own, but when three later novels that same year failed to succeed as well, he journeyed to Hollywood for a job writing a screen treatment of Gogol's Taras Bulba for David O. Selznick. The connection for this job came through Lewton's mother, Nina.
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