Val Lewton — producer (horror) with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon in Yalta, in the Taurida Governorate of the Russian Empire, in May 1904. His father left soon afterwards, and his mother Nina raised him and his elder sister in straitened circumstances. The family moved to Berlin in 1906 and emigrated to the United States in 1909, settling in Westchester County, New York, where the name was anglicised to Lewton.
They had one considerable advantage. Nina's sister had left Yalta years earlier, made herself a major stage actress in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and then repeated the feat in New York under the name Alla Nazimova. By the time the family arrived she was among the most celebrated performers in America, and she found Nina work as a story reader at MGM. Lewton grew up inside the film business through his aunt, and the strong female protagonists who run through his later work are usually traced to the women who raised him.
He studied journalism at Columbia, lost a newspaper job at sixteen over a story he had invented about kosher chickens, and wrote eighteen books - novels, non-fiction and verse, some under his own name and some as Carlos Keith, Cosmo Forbes or Herbert Kerkow. The pulp novel No Bed of Her Own sold well. He worked in MGM's publicity office and then, from 1933 to 1942, as editorial assistant to David O. Selznick.
In 1942 RKO, in financial trouble and watching Universal make money from monsters, set up a low-budget horror unit and put Lewton in charge. The studio owned no recognisable creatures, so he had to invent an approach instead of a monster - and what he arrived at was to show almost nothing. Terror in a Lewton film happens in the dark, at the edge of the frame, in sound and suggestion, and in the viewer's own imagination.
The unit produced Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. Cat People was among RKO's biggest earners of 1942. He worked closely on every script, usually writing the final draft himself, gave Robert Wise and Mark Robson their first films as directors, and worked repeatedly with Boris Karloff, who said afterwards that Lewton had rescued his career.
He left RKO in 1946 and worked at Paramount and MGM without recovering the same conditions. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in March 1951, aged forty-six. The films he made on almost no money are now standard reference points in the history of the genre, and the method he devised - implication rather than display - has outlasted nearly everything it was competing with.
"Yalta to Berlin, 1906; to the United States, 1909"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Yalta
The family name was anglicised from Leventon to Lewton on arrival. His aunt's position in American theatre and film is what put him inside the industry.
Born Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon in Yalta, Taurida Governorate. His mother Nina Leventon was a sister of the actress Alla Nazimova, also born in Yalta, who had been a leading stage performer in Moscow and Saint Petersburg before establishing herself in New York. The family left for Berlin in 1906 and for the United States in 1909.
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Yalta. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.