"I think that few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half as much about human beings as he does."

- Film critic and screenwriter James Agee

EARLY LIFE

Vladimir Ivan Leventon was born in Russian in 1904, immigrated with his mother and sister in 1909 to the United States, and was raised in Port Chester, New York. 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. He often using a selection of pseudonyms for his credits, apparently with the idea of disguising the fact that one person was churning out so many books in such a short space of time. At this same time he spent six years writing movie serializations and other film related copy as part of the M-G-M New York PR office. He sometimes averaged 50,000 words a week. In 1932 he wrote his most popular book, the "best-selling" pulp novel No Bed of Her Own. The book was later made into the film No Man of Her Own (though with a drastically altered shoreline), with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

Devoting himself to full-time writing in 1932, he quit M-G-M. He followed the success of No Bed of Her Own with three more novels in a year, none of which sold as well. An offer came in 1934 to work on a screen treatment of the Russian novel Taras Bulba, so Lewton moved to California, where he became David O. Selznick's story editor. He labored on a number of Selznick's films, contributing the Atlanta Depot scene in Gone With The Wind, producing (with second-unit director Jacques Tourneur) parts of A Tale of Two Cities, and participating in bringing Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock to Hollywood. Peter Viertel was his assistant while with Selznick, at nineteen an aspiring writer who Lewton encouraged to get his first novel published, The Canyon, and who later scripted The African Queen, among others.

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. He raised his son, Val Jr., and daughter Nina, with his wife Ruth, and developed a coterie of friends, many writers and actors of the Hollywood community. But Lewton felt a nagging sense of duty to his conception of art, a feeling for which he often castigated himself while with Selznick:

"The three years which have passed since I last wrote a book have not been particularly happy ones, nor have I added one cubit to my stature, nor to my work or success. I am in a job which fritters away my time, fills me with the most desperate loathing for my fellow men and forces upon me a critical attitude toward the work of my fellows which cannot fail to weaken the self-confidence with which I approach my own work. Time and again I have repeated to myself that my only happiness lies in work, and my only hope of escape from the despised role of story editor-censor."

(From a journal entry dated February 10, 1937. Personal papers, Library of Congress.)

Though artistically troubled, Lewton was financially comfortable working for Selznick, and it was with some difficulty that Lewton gave up that security to accept a 1942 offer to take charge of a special production unit at RKO. Created as an effort to exploit the horror film popularity created by Universal (e.g., Dracula, Frankenstein, et al) and to recover from the financial disasters brought on by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, among others, RKO hoped for big results from films with small budgets.

This article is also at the Lewton B-Unit site in a longer form HERE.