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1-50 of 175
- Visual Effects
- Special Effects
- Cinematographer
Born in Nebraska, John P. Fulton moved with his family to California in 1914. His father, adamant that John NOT become involved with the movie industry, insisted that he study electrical engineering; after graduating from high school, he worked as a surveyor, but frequently took time out to watch D. W. Griffith shooting movies. In the early '20s, Fulton broke into the picture business as a $25-a-week assistant cameraman and worked his way up to operator and finally, at the dawn of the talkie era, to cinematographer. He learned the legerdemain of trick photography while working at the Frank William Laboratory, then moved on to Universal, where he headed the studio's effects department. There Fulton and his team contributed to classics like "Frankenstein", director John Ford's "Air Mail" (a favorite of aviator Fulton) and "The Invisible Man". Fulton and his department also furnished the effects for four Invisible Man sequels, three of which garnered Oscar nominations; so did their work on "The Boys from Syracuse". Loaned out to Sam Goldwyn, Fulton worked on the effects for the Danny Kaye fantasy "Wonder Man, " which won him his first Academy Award. Two more Oscar wins ("The Bridges at Toko-Ri" and "The Ten Commandments") followed during Fulton's Paramount years. When Paramount disbanded their effects department, Fulton continued to work, providing effects (and co-writing the original story) for "The Bamboo Saucer" (released in 1968). Contracting a rare infection while working in Spain on "The Battle of Britain", Fulton died in hospital in England.- In the role of Commando Cody, Judd Holdren patrolled America's threatened skies after actors Tristram Coffin and George Wallace hung up their flying suits. (Coffin was Rocket Man in "King of the Rocket Man" and Wallace was Commando Cody in "Radar Men from the Moon.") Holdren played the airborne hero in "Zombies of the Stratosphere" and also in "Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe", which was shown theatrically as well as on TV. Holdren acted in films from the late '40s through the '50s, then gave up the business and began making his living in the insurance business. He died in 1974.
- The Tennessee-born Snowden (real name: Martha Lee Estes) was a movie actress and model who first made a splash on the Jack Benny TV show, sashaying across the stage at the San Diego Naval base. Twenty thousand sailors gave the curvy sweater-clad starlet a standing ovation that made headlines in "Variety", and every talent scout in Hollywood was on Snowden's trail the very next morning. Three days later, she was hired to make her film debut in director Robert Aldrich's obtuse crime classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955) (Aldrich expanded her role and gave her featured billing). In January 1955, she signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios, beginning by playing up her Dixie drawl in their glossy soap opera All That Heaven Allows (1955). Other movies include Francis in the Navy (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) and the Bridey Murphy-inspired I've Lived Before (1956). In September 1956, Snowden married Dick Contino, a big-name singer/accordion player, and a few years later she retired from acting. Mother to five children from two marriages, she died of cancer at age 51.
- Before he began his acting career, Saxon was a wrestler ("Lord Spears") whose gimmick was entering the arena in a dress suit and quoting Shakespeare at every opportunity. His cauliflower ears marked him for "mug" roles; after making a few movies, he was able to afford plastic surgery and had an operation in hopes of landing different types of acting assignments. One of his first after the procedure was the part of a newspaper journalist seeking a better understanding of desperado Jesse James in 'The True Story of Jesse James' (1957).
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Susan Cabot was born in Boston and raised in a series of eight foster homes. She attended high school in Manhattan, where she took an interest in dramatics and joined the school dramatic club. Later, while trying to decide between a career in music or art, she illustrated children's books during the day and sang at Manhattan's Village Barn at night. It was at this same time that she made her film debut as an extra in Fox's New York-made Kiss of Death (1947) and worked in New York-based television. Maxwell Arnow, a casting director for Columbia Pictures, spotted Cabot at the Village Barn, and a co-starring role in that studio's B-grade South Seas drama On the Isle of Samoa (1950) resulted. While in Hollywood Cabot was also signed for the role of an Indian maiden in Universal's Tomahawk (1951) with Van Heflin. Subsequently signed to an exclusive contract by Universal, Cabot co-starred in a long string of films opposite leading men like John Lund, Tony Curtis and Audie Murphy. Inevitably, she became fed up with the succession of western and Arabian Nights roles, asked for a release from her Universal pact and accepted an offer from Harold Robbins to star in his play "A Stone for Danny Fisher" in New York. Roger Corman lured her back to Hollywood to play the lead in the melodramatic rock-'n-'roller Carnival Rock (1957) and she stayed on to star in five more films for the enterprising young producer-director. After a highly publicized 1959 fling with Jordan's King Hussein, Cabot divided her time between TV work and roles in stage plays and musicals.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
With all due respect to the man himself, it is hard to think of any horror filmmaker who made movies that were as cheap or as ridiculed as Jerry Warren's. Whether making shoestring quickies like The Incredible Petrified World (1959) or Teenage Zombies (1959), or mangling Mexican imports, Warren could be counted on through the late '50s and early '60s to deliver the lowest common denominator in horror. Warren said that he grew up with the same natural inclination that every other kid growing up in Los Angeles had: He wanted to get into the movie business. He first pursued this ambition by playing small parts in such '40s films as Ghost Catchers (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945) and Unconquered (1947). A producer made a big impression on Warren when he said, "In this town, producers are the ones that have it all". Warren subsequently took the producers' plunge in 1956 with the horror adventure Man Beast (1956).- Director
- Additional Crew
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
The oldest of three sons, Reginald LeBorg majored in political economy at the University of Austria and studied musical composition for a year at Arnold Schoenberg's Composition Seminar. His education completed, LeBorg entered his father's banking business and, acting as the senior LeBorg's representative, traveled to Prague, Hamburg and Paris to transact family business negotiations. During his two-year stay in Paris he studied at the Sorbonne. In the mid-'20s LeBorg traveled to New York to dispose of a collection of paintings on his father's behalf. Remaining in New York, he was employed by several banks and brokerage houses and at an advertising agency. The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out the LeBorg family fortune, and Reginald's interest in the financial world waned. He returned to Europe and his first love, the stage. He worked at the Max Reinhardt School in Vienna, and later devoted much of his time to directing operas and musical comedies for provincial houses throughout Central Europe. Arriving on the Hollywood scene in the early 1930s, LeBorg appeared as an extra in pictures at Paramount and Metro and later staged opera sequences in the Grace Moore hits One Night of Love (1934) and Love Me Forever (1935), as well as other films with operatic themes at Fox, Paramount and United Artists. After a number of second-unit assignments at MGM, Goldwyn and Selznick, LeBorg joined Universal, where he turned out band shorts. An 18-month hitch with the U.S. Army interrupted his Hollywood career, which resumed in 1943 with his return to Universal and his promotion to feature film director. He later worked in TV.- Tristram Coffin was born in a Utah mining community, grew up in Salt Lake City, and started acting while in high school. He later continued acting with traveling stock companies. Having earned a degree in speech at the University of Washington, he worked as a news analyst and sportscaster until a Hollywood talent scout approached him with the idea of putting him in films. Coffin's sinister looks served him well in the roles he played in serials like Perils of Nyoka (1942) and Spy Smasher (1942), but there were occasional hero roles, too, as in the feature The Corpse Vanishes (1942) with Bela Lugosi. He donned the bullet helmet and gadget-laden leather jacket of Rocket Man in the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men (1949). Baby boomers might remember Coffin best as the Arizona Ranger Captain in the 1950s Western series 26 Men (1957).
- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Writer Robb White was partnered with "gimmick horror film" king William Castle during Castle's most popular and productive period. Born in the Philippines, White was a preacher's son who held a wide variety of jobs before landing in the Navy during World War II. He initially collaborated with Castle on the short-lived TV series Men of Annapolis (1957), then joined forces with the enterprising producer-director on the horror thrillers Macabre (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), Homicidal (1961), and the kiddie-oriented 13 Ghosts (1960). He later went back to TV writing, including Perry Mason (1957).- Born in turn-of-the-century Yonkers, New York, Robert Shayne (born Robert Shaen Dawe) worked at a variety of jobs before his interests ultimately turned toward acting. He appeared in a succession of legit theater productions throughout the 1930s and even appeared in a few films, making a comedy short in New York in 1929, two features in 1934 and a comedy short shot in New York in 1937. In 1942 he signed with Warner Brothers and trekked to Hollywood, where he became a contract player at their Culver City studios. Warners starred the newly-arrived stage actor in a series of two-reel Westerns before graduating him to supporting roles in "A"-level features. In 1946 he left the studio to freelance. Several years later he got involved in the infant medium of TV, where he played the part for which he is best remembered--Inspector Henderson in the series Adventures of Superman (1952).
- Actor
- Soundtrack
New York-born Morrow developed an interest in the theater as a result of his studies at art school. As "Irving Morrow," he was acting on stage (in Pennsylvania) as early as 1927; he later appeared in such plays as "Penal Law", "Once in a Lifetime", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Twelfth Night", "Romeo and Juliet" and "Macbeth", treading the boards opposite stars like Katharine Cornell, Maurice Evans, Katharine Hepburn, Luise Rainer and Mae West. His film career commenced with the Biblical epic "The Robe" in 1953 and continued into the '70s. In his latter years, he worked as a commercial illustrator while taking occasional acting assignments.- Actor
- Writer
- Director
The son of a hardware merchant and cousin of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, Robert Hutton was born in Kingston, New York, and attended Blair Academy in New Jersey. For several seasons the future film actor was a leading man and director with the Woodstock Playhouse stock company in New York. He supplemented his income by posing for the photographic illustrations in sensational magazines and tabloids like "Modern Confessions". He spent several years as a Warner Brothers contract player, but went through some lean times after he left the studio and even considered going into some other field. Hutton stuck with show business, working in movies, TV and even doing some writing and directing. After working in England for several years he returned to the US and settled again in Kingston, NY, where he was born. He suffered a broken back in an in-home fall and spent his last days in a nursing-care facility. He told an interviewer, "I lived a fantasy in Hollywood. I met and worked with so many people now considered legends. And then, just when I wondered why I was even alive, I broke my back, and the Lord opened up a whole new world of opportunity for me". Hutton wrote an autobiography but it was never published because (according to Hutton) he wouldn't dish dirt on the stars he knew.- A native Ohioan, John Howard (born John R. Cox, Jr.) had no interest in working in theater until schoolmates at Cleveland's Western Reserve University turned him on to acting. After some work on his college stage, he made his movie debut in a bit part in Paramount's One Hour Late (1934) before moving up the Hollywood ladder to featured parts and ultimately landing his own series, the Bulldog Drummond mysteries. Decades later, when offers of work began to slow down, Howard went into teaching.
Best-known for his role as Ronald Colman's brother in director Frank Capra's classic Lost Horizon (1937), Howard later said he felt he did a bad job of playing the character: "Damn it, I thought I was too brash, too uncontrolled, too unbelievable. And I've wished always that I could go back and do it again." - Writer
- Director
- Actor
Born just before the century turned, Charles Bennett made his writing debut as a child in 1911, fought in France during World War I while still a teen and resumed his acting career after the war's end. In 1926 he dropped acting to concentrate on being a playwright, later turning one of his most famous plays, "Blackmail," into a screenplay for production under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. The affiliation with "Hitch" continued into the early 1940s, by which time both Bennett and the director were working in Hollywood. He wrote for producers ranging from Cecil B. DeMille to Irwin Allen to the penny-pinching folks at AIP. "If I couldn't write, I wouldn't want to live," commented Bennett, who had projects (including a remake of "Blackmail") going right up to the time of his death.- Director
- Editor
- Editorial Department
Virgil W. Vogel began his career at Universal in 1940 as an assistant editor. He worked as an editor for many years, although by the mid-'50s he had begun to tire of the job and pressed Universal executive Edward Muhl for a shot at directing. Vogel was handed The Mole People (1956) with John Agar, and his capable handling of that film led to other assignments at the studio. Vogel later directed many made-for-television movies as well as episodes of TV's Bonanza (1959), Wagon Train (1957), M Squad (1957), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), Mission: Impossible (1966), Quantum Leap (1989), Spenser: For Hire (1985) and many others.- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Colorado-born Herk Harvey majored in theater at Kansas University, directing and acting in stage productions and later returning to the school in a teaching capacity. He broke into the film business as an actor in some of the movies being made by Centron Corporation of Lawrence, Kansas, an educational and industrial film production company for which he subsequently went to work as a director. In 1961 he took a working vacation from Centron to try his hand at feature filmmaking, producing, directing and co-starring in the creepy horror film Carnival of Souls (1962), shot in Kansas and Utah.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Casting Director
Michael Fox first "trod the boards" in grade school plays in his hometown of Yonkers, New York. After toying with the idea of becoming a history teacher, Fox did "something as foreign to my nature as one could think of", becoming a "boomer" (a migratory railroad worker) and taking jobs as a brakeman with various lines. His interest in acting was rekindled in the mid-'40s and he appeared in several "little theater" plays in Los Angeles. An acting-directing stint in a Players Ring production of "Home of the Brave" caught the eye of Harry Sauber, an associate of exploitation mogul "Jungle Sam" Sam Katzman, and Fox landed his first film role (A Yank in Indo-China (1952)). He appeared in dozens of movies (and innumerable TV episodes) in the decades since; one of his regular TV roles was as the coroner in the courtroom drama Perry Mason (1957).- Actress
- Soundtrack
The daughter of husband-and-wife vaudevillians, Randy Stuart was born in southeastern Iola, Kansas and traveled throughout the South and Midwest with her itinerant parents before making her own stage debut with them at the ripe old age of three. The family eventually settled in California where Randy attended college, acted in school plays and caught the eye of Hollywood talent scouts; she enacted a scene from the play "The Women" in a screen test which impressed 20th Century-Fox executives enough to put her under contract. She made her film debut with an uncredited part in The Foxes of Harrow (1947) starring Maureen O'Hara (I) and Rex Harrison.
In 1950, the blonde, smoky-voiced actress made a brief impression as the calculating telephone roommate of Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter (I) in the classic backstage film All About Eve (1950). She then moved up front and center as the distaff part of a husband-and-wife spy team in "Biff Baker, U.S.A." (1952) which also starred Alan Hale Jr. (I). Randy later was given her best-remembered role in the cult sci-fi The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). as Louise Carey, the concerned wife of tiny Scott Carey, played by Grant Williams (I).
The next year she was cast as Nancy Dawson in the western film Man from God's Country (1958) opposite George Montgomery which was followed by a guest-star appearance in Montgomery's short-lived television western series "Cimarron City" (1958). She also had a one-season (1959-60) regular role on the western series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" (1955).
After this she would remain focused on 1960s' TV, wherein she sporadically appeared in a number of popular series, mostly crime dramas and westerns, such as "Bonanza," "Maverick," "Peter Gunn," "Cheyenne" and "77 Sunset Strip." Retiring by the mid 1960s, she was spotted only a couple of times after that. In the series "Dragnet" she appeared a couple of times as co-star Harry Morgan (I)' and she made a single appearance in a mid 70s "Marcus Welby" episode.
She died in 1996 at age 71.- Bryant Haliday was born in Rhode Island and spent time in an English Benedictine monastery. Entering Harvard to study international law, he became involved with a group of students who were interested in putting on plays. He caught the acting bug and abruptly gave up law to become a man of the theater. They bought an abandoned church, converted it into the Brattle Theatre (Haliday called the Cambridge, Massachusetts, landmark "an unashamed imitation of the Bristol Old Vic") and produced 64 plays, joining the cast of over 50. He later opened a small movie revival house and began hunting in Europe for film acquisitions; picking up the rights to classics like The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Bullocks (1953). Haliday and partner Cyrus Harvey founded Janus Films. Haliday was also a movie actor, turning up most regularly in the horror thrillers of his producer friend Richard Gordon (Devil Doll (1964), Voodoo Blood Death (1965), The Projected Man (1966)), among others). Late in life he lived in France, where he worked as a producer, writer and actor in Paris theater and on French TV.
- Make-Up Department
- Actor
- Art Department
During the horror/sci-fi boom of the 1950s, makeup man Harry Thomas was associated with some of the most memorable personalities and pictures of the period. He worked with Roger Corman, Edward D. Wood Jr., Tor Johnson and Richard E. Cunha, and contributed to such films as Frankenstein's Daughter (1958), Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), Killers from Space (1954), The Neanderthal Man (1953), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and many more. Thomas began his career in the 1930s when one of his first jobs was at MGM working under renowned makeup artist Jack Dawn and his assistant William Tuttle. Thomas is best-known for his work on horror movies, in which he almost invariably had to make something out of nothing.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
New York-born Harry Essex planned on a writing career throughout his young life. Among his first jobs were stints on the New York newspapers "The Daily Mirror" and "The Brooklyn Eagle", short stories for "Collier's" and "The Saturday Evening Post" and even a Broadway play titled "Something for Nothing" (which Essex later called "a resounding failure"). Writing for the movies was uppermost in Essex's mind throughout the period (and he DID co-write the original story for Universal's Man Made Monster (1941)), but "the big break" never came, and World War II intervened. Five or six days after Essex's discharge, he ran into an old acquaintance whose new job was finding playwrights to turn into screenwriters for Columbia Pictures. Essex wrote or co-wrote dozens of movies and numerous TV shows during his lengthy Hollywood career.- Producer
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Oklahoma-bred John Ashley got his start in the movie business while on a vacation in California. A friend from Oklahoma State University got him onto the set of the John Wayne movie The Conqueror (1956), and Wayne in turn steered him toward a job in television in the William Castle series Men of Annapolis (1957). One day, Ashley was at the offices of American International Pictures to pick up his girlfriend, who was auditioning for a part in the company's Dragstrip Girl (1957). AIP house writer Lou Rusoff saw Ashley waiting in the hall and decided the young man was the type AIP was looking for to play the Dragstrip Girl (1957) male lead. Ashley acted in a long line of "kids-in-trouble" melodramas, monster movies and in the Beach Party series before carving a lucrative niche for himself as producer-star of a series of Filipino exploitation pictures. He was also producer of several TV series, including The A-Team (1983) and Werewolf (1987).- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Born in Delmar, DE, William Alland began his show-biz career as an actor with a semi-professional Baltimore troupe. Arriving in Manhattan with $25, "a paper suitcase" and the ambition to work on Broadway, he took courses and acted at the Henry Street Settlement House, where he met "boy wonder" Orson Welles, then on the eve of forming his Mercury Theatre group. Alland got in on the ground floor, acting with the Mercury Players on the New York stage and in radio (including the notorious Halloween 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast) before playing the (camera-shy) reporter Thompson in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). During World War II Alland was a combat pilot (50 missions over the South Pacific); in the postwar years he was the Peabody Award-winning producer of radio's groundbreaking "Doorway to Life". He then turned movie producer, cranking out a series of features (mostly sci-fi films and Westerns) at Universal-International in the 1950s.- Actor
- Director
- Soundtrack
The star of many land and underwater adventures, Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr. was born on January 15, 1913 in San Leandro, California, to Harriet Evelyn (Brown) and Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Sr., who owned a movie theater and also worked in the hotel business. He grew up in various Northern California towns. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but young Lloyd's interests turned to acting while at the University of California at Los Angeles. (Dorothy Dean Bridges, Bridges' wife of more than 50 years, was one of his UCLA classmates, and appeared opposite him in a romantic play called "March Hares.") He later worked on the Broadway stage, helped to found an off-Broadway theater, and acted, produced and directed at Green Mans ions, a theater in the Catskills. Bridges made his first films in 1936, and went under contract to Columbia in 1941. Allegations that Bridges had been involved with the Communist Party threatened to derail his career in the early 1950s, but he resumed work after testifying as a cooperative witness before the House Un-American Activities, admitting his past party membership and recanting. Making the transition to television, Bridges became a small screen star of giant proportions by starring in Sea Hunt (1958), the country's most successful syndicated series. Trouper Bridges worked right to the end, winning even more new fans with his spoofy portrayals in the movies Airplane! (1980) and Hot Shots! (1991), and their respective sequels. Lloyd Bridges died at age 85 of natural causes on March 10, 1998.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
One of the most prolific B-movie composers, Albert Glasser started off as a copyist in the music department at Warner Brothers in the late 1930s, learning the art of film scoring from scratch while working under such big guns as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He graduated to orchestrating, and by the mid-'40s was composing and directing his own scores. A hard, fast worker, Glasser found his musical skills put to the test in the frantic, down-to-the-wire world of B-picture making. He scored a staggering 135 movies between 1944 and 1962, not counting at least 35 features for which he received no credit. In addition to scoring 300 television shows and 450 radio programs, he arranged and conducted for noted American operetta composer Rudolf Friml and orchestrated for Ferde Grofé Sr. (with whom he first collaborated on the sci-fi classic Rocketship X-M (1950)).- Director
- Actor
Robert Gist was a tough kid who grew up around the Chicago stockyards during the Depression. Reform school-bound after injuring another boy in a fistfight, Gist instead ended up in Chicago's Hull House, a settlement house where he first became interested in acting. Work in Chicago radio was followed by stage acting roles in Chicago and on Broadway (in the long-running "Harvey" with Josephine Hull). While acting in "Harvey", he made his film debut in New York-shot scenes for 20th Century-Fox's Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Gist was also seen on Broadway in director Charles Laughton's "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial" (1954) with Henry Fonda and John Hodiak. While shooting Operation Petticoat (1959) in Key West, Florida, Gist told director Blake Edwards that he was interested in directing; Edwards later hired him to helm episodes of the TV series Peter Gunn (1958). Gist has also directed for TV's Naked City (1958), The Twilight Zone (1959), Route 66 (1960) and many others.- Editor
- Director
- Producer
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Tom Boutross co-directed the 1959 sci-fi drama The Hideous Sun Demon (1958). He subsequently worked for many years on TV's The Magical World of Disney (1954) under its new title "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color." Boutross spent most of his career as an editor, beginning in with the aforementioned The Hideous Sun Demon (1958) and ending with Dark Before Dawn (1988).- Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Louis Albert Denninger Jr. was the son of a garment manufacturer who relocated and set up shop in Los Angeles when Louis Jr. was 18 months old. After finishing school, Denninger enrolled at Woodbury Business College and majored in business and accounting, graduating cum laude with a master's in business administration. But Denninger, who never liked accounting, started becoming involved in little theater groups as a hobby and was encouraged to compete in a radio contest called "Do You Want to Be an Actor?", winning a screen test at Warner Brothers. Warners wasn't interested in him because he looked too much like another well-known actor under contract, but by now he had his heart set on a movie career. Denninger was soon signed by Paramount, who insisted on changing his name (to "Richard Denning") because his real name, Denninger, sounded too much like gunman John Dillinger's. He retired and moved to Maui but was asked to play the governor in TV's Hawaii Five-O (1968). He agreed to play the governor as long as he didn't have to be in every episode. It ran for 12 years, ending in 1980. Five years later, his actress-wife Evelyn Ankers died at their up-country Maui home (cancer). "I'm very grateful for a career that wasn't spectacular, but always made a good living or filled in "in-between," Denning said of his acting days. "I have wonderful memories of it, but I don't really miss it."
- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Born in Freeport, Pennsylvania, Don Taylor studied law, then speech and drama at Penn State University, where as a freshman he began taking part in college stage productions. Hitchhiking to Hollywood in 1942, the youthful Taylor screen-tested at Warner Brothers but was rejected because of his draft status. MGM, not as fussy, signed him to a contract and immediately put him to work, assigning him the minuscule role of a soldier in director Clarence Brown's sentimental slice of Americana, The Human Comedy (1943). More minor roles followed before Taylor enlisted in the Army; but even there he continued to act: Playwright/screenwriter Moss Hart chose him to play one of the leads in the United States Army Air Forces' production of Hart's play, "Winged Victory." Taylor met his first wife, actress Phyllis Avery, when she was also in Winged Victory. Returning to civilian life, Taylor resumed his work in pictures with a top role in the trend-setting crime drama The Naked City (1948). In later years Taylor became a film and TV director, being nominated for an Emmy for his direction of an episode of The Farmer's Daughter. Taylor met his second wife Hazel Court when he directed her in a 1958 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955).- Actor
- Stunts
A champion athlete and trackman in his native northern Australia, Gil Perkins always wanted to get into films; as a teenager he virtually ran away from home, taking a job as a deck hand on a Norwegian freighter. He eventually landed in Hollywood in the late '20s, during the era of part-silent, part-talkie movies, and (because his accent was mistaken for English) he played young Englishmen in some of his first films. He soon drifted into stuntwork, regularly doubling cowboy star William Boyd and putting a red toupee over his own blond hair to double 'Red Skelton', among others. Some of his most notable stunt jobs were in the sci-fi/horror field. He doubled star Bruce Cabot throughout King Kong (1933), stood in for Spencer Tracy as Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) and replaced Bela Lugosi as the Monster in the climactic battle sequence of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). In addition to his feature films, Perkins turned up regularly in serials and on TV. On many occasions he worked with special effects and rigging departments, setting up large action scenes. By the 1960s he was doing more acting than stunts; he "officially" retired in 1972, although he took a number of subsequent jobs.- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Aubrey Schenck practiced law for seven years (1932-39) in New York City, connected with the legal department of 20th Century-Fox; he was also an assistant to Fox president Spyros P. Skouras, who was based in New York. Schenck wrote a story and submitted it to the studio, asking to be given the chance to produce the picture as well. When the resultant movie (Shock (1946) with Vincent Price) turned out well, Schenck went on to work on other Fox films, then shifted to newly-formed Eagle-Lion Pictures. In the 1950s, Schenck paired with Howard W. Koch and they began their own indie production company (Bel-Air), releasing their features through United Artists. Schenck and Koch later went their separate ways (Koch went to work for Frank Sinatra Enterprises), but Schenck stayed true to his adventure- and horror-picture roots, adding to his filmography such titles as Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Superbeast (1972), Daughters of Satan (1972), Ambush Bay (1966) and others.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Producer
Jacques Marquette moved to Hollywood in 1919 and attended Hollywood High School. Breaking into the business as a "gofer" for his older brother Joe, a newsreel cameraman, Marquette's first job was assisting Joe on coverage of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Later, after a World War II stint as a cameraman for the Air Force's film division, Marquette accepted a $69-a-week job at Technicolor Labs as a technician. By 1957 he had moved up to camera operator on various studio pictures but was still facing the difficulty of climbing to the next level (director of photography). He founded Marquette Productions with the intention of producing low-budget features, and hired himself as cinematographer. During this phase of his career, he also wrote, produced and (on Teenage Monster (1957)) reluctantly directed. His favorite of the films he produced is the campy The Brain from Planet Arous (1957).- Actor
- Soundtrack
William Benedict was active in the drama department of his Tulsa, Oklahoma, high school and, at the height of the Depression (1934), decided to relocate to California. At first, he wanted to be a dancer, but when he discovered that dancers were a dime-a-dozen in Hollywood, he concentrated on acting. He made his film debut in Fox's $10 Raise (1935) and went onto the Fox payroll as a "featured player". After leaving Fox, he played some of his larger parts in serials and in the East Side Kids/Bowery Boys features in which he was a regular. During his half-century-plus career, Benedict has had roles in practically every type of movie; there's only one thing that the ex-hoofer might have enjoyed doing in a movie, but never had the chance: "Strange as it seems, I've never once danced in a picture!".- Born Ralph Bowman, the future film and TV star moved to California with his family when he was five; he attended Hollywood High and the University of Southern California. He first set his sights on a job behind the camera, taking a cinematography course at USC, but then couldn't even land an entry-level position. He later drifted into acting, on stage at the Ben Bard Playhouse and in serials at Universal and Republic. He then entered a radio contest, "Jesse Lasky's Gateway to Hollywood", where aspiring actors competed for a studio contract. The top prize, an RKO contract made out in the name of "John Archer", was won by Bowman after 13 weeks of competition (edging out Hugh Beaumont for the prize and the "Archer" name). The actor quips, "I went from being a Bowman to an Archer!" He has four children, two by wife number one Marjorie Lord (one of whom is Anne Archer) and two by his second wife Ann Leddy (whom he married in 1956).
- David Duncan didn't begin to write full-time until the age of 33, in 1946, after ten years of work in government administration and public services. He began screenwriting in 1953 and started writing science-fiction movies after one of his SF novels, "Dark Dominion", was serialized in "Collier's" magazine. His favorite among the sci-fi films he wrote is The Time Machine (1960), "by a huge margin."
- Director
- Producer
- Editor
Sidney Hayers entered films in the early 1940s, working in the sound department, as a focus puller and in the cutting room before he began his directing career with Rebound (1959) in 1958. The journeyman director's roster of credits also includes episodic TV on both sides of the Atlantic, a multitude of TV movies and second-unit directing chores on epic films like A Night to Remember (1958) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). At the end of his life, he was residing in Spain with his actress-wife Erika Remberg.- Director
- Production Manager
- Producer
Born in England on Christmas Day, 1905, Lewis Allen first came on the show-biz scene when he was appointed executive in charge of West End and Broadway stage productions for famed impresario Gilbert Miller. Allen also co-directed some of the productions (including the celebrated "Victoria Regina" with Helen Hayes and Vincent Price) before he was lured to Hollywood by Paramount studio head Buddy G. DeSylva. The Uninvited (1944), based on Dorothy Macardle's best-selling novel, made for an auspicious directing debut; its success prompted an immediate follow-up, the suspense thriller The Unseen (1945) (with a script by Raymond Chandler). Otherwise, his filmography leans heavily toward "tough guy" movies of the Alan Ladd-George Raft-Edward G. Robinson school. Allen also directed much TV (Perry Mason (1957), The Big Valley (1965), Mission: Impossible (1966), Little House on the Prairie (1974), many more).- Director
- Sound Department
- Writer
Edward Bernds was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois. While in his junior year in Lake View High School, he and several friends formed a small radio club and obtained amateur licenses. In the early '20s there was considerable prestige for an amateur operator (a "ham") to have commercial radio licenses, and Bernds was in a good position to get into broadcasting when he graduated in 1923, a year when radio stations began popping up all over Chicago. He found employment--at age 20--as chief operator at Chicago's WENR. When talking pictures burst onto the scene in the late '20s, Bernds and broadcast operators like him relocated to Hollywood to work as sound technicians in "the talkies". After a brief stint at United Artists, Bernds quit and went to work at Columbia, where he worked as sound man on many of Frank Capra's '30s classics. He later graduated to directing two-reel shorts and then features.- Script and Continuity Department
- Writer
- Actress
Born in New York, teenage Shirley Ulmer came out to the movie capital for the first time in the early 1930s, after her banker-father was wiped out in the Crash. While her dad tried to make a new start in California, Shirley met picture people and began working as a script supervisor. She was married to independent producer Max Alexander when she met and instantly fell in love with director Edgar G. Ulmer, eventually divorcing Alexander--nephew of Universal president Carl Laemmle. Hollywood outcasts, Ulmer and his new missus Shirley were subsequently forced to work in the East, on Poverty Row and at other small indie studios, where the indomitable Ulmer forged a remarkable career as a master of minimalism. Shirley is also a writer of screenplays, teleplays (The Lone Ranger (1949), Batman (1966), S.W.A.T. (1975), CHiPs (1977), more) and the book "The Role of Script Supervision in Film and Television"; in recent years, she and daughter Arianne have maintained a high profile keeping alive the memory of Ulmer and his highly personal films. They are currently collaborating on the documentary "The Edgar G. Ulmer Story."- Actor
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Born in Kansas, Max Showalter picked up the "acting bug" as a toddler when mother used to take him to the local theater where she played the piano for silent movies. He acted in 92 shows at the Pasadena Playhouse between 1935 and '38, made his Broadway debut under the aegis of Oscar Hammerstein II in "Knights of Song" and acted for two years in the cast of Irving Berlin's traveling musical "This Is the Army." In addition to his films, TV appearances (over 1000), and stage shows, Showalter was a composer, a songwriter, and pianist. In his later years he lived in an 18th-century farmhouse in the Connecticut town he fell in love with while shooting the movie It Happened to Jane (1959).- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Additional Crew
If only one Hollywood name is synonymous with speed and efficiency, it has to be Lee "Roll 'Em" Sholem. In a 40-year career, he directed upwards of 1300 shows, both features and TV episodes, without once going over schedule--a feat probably unparalleled in Hollywood history. Sholem started out in the cutting room some time in the 1930s. A lengthy association with "Tarzan" producer Sol Lesser brought him in contact with the celebrated William Cameron Menzies, from whom Sholem learned the key to expedient production, and later led to his first directorial assignment (Lesser's Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949)).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Born in New York City, Rose Hobart responded to the lure of the theater at a young age, went on stage at 15, then drifted to Hollywood and embarked on a movie career. Hobart film-debuted in the 1930 Fox version of "Liliom" and went on to appear in over 40 additional films, both in the A and B category. But by the late 1940s, her political views and pro-union stance caused her to be blacklisted. After a period of inactivity, she returned to acting in the 1960s on TV's Peyton Place (1964). For many years she resided at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, not far from Hollywood, where she enjoyed editing the House Newsletter.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1902, Curt Siodmak worked as an engineer and a newspaper reporter before entering the literary and movie fields. It was as a reporter that he got his first break (of sorts) in films: in 1926 he and his reporter-wife hired on as extras on Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) in order to get a story on the director and his film. One of Siodmak's first film-writing assignments was the screenplay for the German sci-fi picture F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932) (US title: "Floating Platform 1 Does Not Answer"), based on his own novel. Compelled to leave Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power, Siodmak went to work as a screenwriter in England and then moved to Hollywood in 1937. He got a job at Universal through his director-friend Joe May, helping write the script for May's The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Because the film went over well, Siodmak says, he fell into the horror/science-fiction "groove."- Gloria Talbott was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, a city co-founded by her great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Nye Patterson. Growing up in the shadows of the Hollywood studios, her interests inevitably turned to acting, with the result that she participated in school plays and landed small parts in films such as "Maytime" (1937), "Sweet and Lowdown" (1943) and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945). After leaving school, she started her own dramatic group and played "arena"-style shows at various clubs. After a three-year hiatus (marriage, motherhood and divorce), Talbott resumed her career, working extensively in both TV and films. Her sister is actress Lori Talbott.
- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Born in Hollis, Oklahoma, Douglas Benton was an oil field "roughneck, " a wartime bombardier/navigator cadet, a newscaster and an Associated Press bureau chief before moving to Hollywood and becoming story editor, associate producer and ultimately producer of TV's prestigious "General Electric Theater." His other TV producing credits include "Thriller, " "Dr. Kildare, " "The Rookies", "Police Woman", "Ironside", "The Name of the Game, " "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.", "Magnum, P.I". and "Columbo", for which he won an Emmy.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Marie Windsor (born Emily Marie Bertelsen) was born in Marysvale, Utah, and attended Brigham Young University. She trained for the stage under Maria Ouspenskaya before she began playing leading roles in B pictures in the late 1940s. So many B films in fact, that she garnered the title of 'Queen of the Bs'.
She was a talent - to paraphrase a cliché - of the right type and the right time. If film noir could have manufactured an archetype, it would most definitely have been Marie.
With Ms Windsor's bedroom eyes ('they didn't fit for a 'goody-goody wife, or a nice little girlfriend' ) she smouldered on screens, in scenes with John Garfield, and many others, in some of her best work. Marie's femme fatale (Ms Windsor was later quoted as saying a femme fatale is '...usually the woman who gets the man into bed... then into trouble') was on screen, most notably her role as the manipulative, double-crossing wife of Elisha Cook Jr. in The Killing (1956) (which earned her "Look" magazine's Best Supporting Actress award).
Marie later said she loved playing them because they're '... the type of character audience's never forget'.
Some of her favourites amongst her own films, in addition to The Killing (1956), are The Narrow Margin (1952) and Hellfire (1949).
Marie married was married twice before she met Jack Hupp, a realtor with whom she had a son. After retiring from films, Marie took up sculpting and painting.
Marie passed away one day before her 81st birthday. She's interred with her husband in her hometown.
Marie said audience's 'loved to hate her', and this is only partially true; audience's love Ms Windsor for the dynamism she portrayed, and as film noir gains new fans every day - more than 3/4 of a century since their heyday, it's a love affair which shows no signs of abating.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Ray Walston started his acting career as a spear carrier with a local stock company. When the family moved to Houston, Texas, Walston's father wanted to teach him the oil business, but Walston instead joined a traveling repertory company (selling tickets as well as acting). He went on to associate with Margo Jones at the Houston Civic Theater for six years, then spent three seasons with the Cleveland Playhouse before arriving in New York in 1945. He has won a Tony Award for his performance as the Devil in Broadway's "Damn Yankees", two Emmy Awards for Picket Fences (1992), and become a household name playing the extraterrestrial "Uncle Martin" on My Favorite Martian (1963). Ray Walston died at age 86 of lupus on New Year's Day 2001 in Beverly Hills, California.- Producer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Getting his start in the movie business in Universal's contract and playdate department in New York City, Howard W. Koch moved on to 20th Century-Fox as a film librarian and then entered production as second assistant director on The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). After many films as assistant director, Koch joined forces with his professional benefactor Aubrey Schenck and Edwin F. Zabel to strike a three-picture production deal with United Artists that was to start with the western War Paint (1953). The success of these pictures opened up the deal for more UA films by Koch, Schenck and Zabel (Bel-Air Productions). With Schenck, Koch produced TV's Miami Undercover (1961) and also worked as a director on such series as Maverick (1957), Hawaiian Eye (1959), Cheyenne (1955) and The Untouchables (1959). From 1961 to 1964 Koch was vice-president in charge of production for Sinatra Enterprises; among his many executive-producer credits during this period was the chilling The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He became the production head at Paramount in 1964 and then shifted gears two years later to form his own production unit, which supplied major features to Paramount for years. By all accounts one of the best-loved men in Hollywood, Koch was a recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1990 Oscarcast.- The son of an Army officer, Walter Reed was born in Washington and grew up in Honolulu and Los Angeles, where he attended school with the children of movie stars. After his parents' divorce, and, during the darkest days of the Depression, 17-year-old Reed decided to try acting as a career and made a two-week trip to New York (via hitched rides on railroad freight cars, amidst hobos and tramps) to look for work on the stage. He worked in stock and on Broadway and, with an assist from actor Joel McCrea, broke into pictures in the early 1940s.
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Actor
Born in Oklahoma in 1915, Witney broke into the business in 1933, working at Mascot, the leading producer of low-budget serials. After Mascot and other small companies merged in 1935 to form Republic, Witney graduated to director (at 21, he was Hollywood's youngest). Witney teamed with director John English on many of the era's best serials, most of them highlighted by kinetic fight and chase scenes that helped change the face of action moviemaking. Witney also directed many features and much TV. Retired since the late 1970s, he has authored two books, "In a Door, Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase" (about his serial directing career) and "Trigger Remembered" (about Roy Rogers' famed movie horse).