Sam Katzman
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Sam Katzman (July 7, 1901 – August 4, 1973) was an American film producer and director. Born into a poor Jewish family, Katzman went to work as a stage laborer at the age of 13 in the fledgling East Coast film industry. He would learn all aspects of filmmaking and become a highly successful Hollywood producer for more than forty years.
Katzman produced cost-effective productions that made money for the studios and the financial backers. He is noted for numerous Western films of the 1930s, his Bela Lugosi and East Side Kids features of the 1940s, the 15-chapter Superman serial of 1948, and a string of rock-'n'-roll musicals in the 1950s. At MGM Studios in the 1960s, Katzman produced several Elvis Presley films and singer Roy Orbison's only film, The Fastest Guitar Alive.
In 1945 Katzman accepted a contract from Columbia Pictures to produce adventure serials and, soon after, feature films. For two years he worked for both Monogram and Columbia, grinding out serials and low-budget features at a truly torrential pace. In 1947 he joined Columbia full-time, with a series of four Jean Porter musical comedies and another two Gloria Jean vehicles. In 1949 he hired Olympic hero and movie Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller (who had been replaced by Lex Barker in the RKO Tarzan films) for a series of Jungle Jim adventures, earning Katzman the nickname "Jungle Sam." By 1955 Columbia turned Jungle Jim into a television property, and legalities prevented Columbia from making any more Jungle Jims for theaters, Katzman simply shrugged off the Jungle Jim character and had Johnny Weissmuller use his own name in three more features. The last one, Jungle Moon Men (Charles S. Gould, 1955), was yet another remake of Sir H. Rider Haggard’s classic novel She. (After Katzman stopped making the features, Weissmuller starred in 39 "Jungle Jim" TV episodes.)
Katzman revitalized the waning serial market with his 1948 production Superman, starring Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel, and erstwhile "Teen Agers" actress Noel Neill as Lois Lane. The 15-chapter cliffhanger was tremendously successful, spawning two more superhero serials, Batman and Robin (1949) and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950). Katzman continued to produce serials until 1956; his Blazing the Overland Trail (a very-low-budget patchwork of old stock footage and new scenes, with the actors costumed to match three serial heroes of the 1940s!) rang down the curtain on the serial genre. (Columbia would reissue Katzman's serials through 1965.)
One of Katzman's specialties at Columbia was taking a major news story, popular trend, or musical craze and making a film about it. He worked so quickly that the film could play theaters while the topic was still hot, ensuring big profits. One of his first pictures of this type was 1948's I Surrender Dear, cashing in on the new disc-jockey phenomenon in broadcasting. He used elements from this picture as a blueprint for his 1956 rock-and-roll musical hit, Rock Around the Clock.
On the set, Katzman would use his collection of canes as a personal prop, banging them against the floor, or the scenery, when production fell behind schedule. The pace of Katzman’s film production from 1950 to 1959 is blistering, touching nearly all the generic bases in the process. Starting in 1950 with director William Berke’s Mark of the Gorilla, Katzman proved himself a master of all genres, with such films as Lew Landers’s Tyrant of the Sea (1950), a rapidly paced swashbuckler; Spencer Gordon Bennet’s Cody of the Pony Express (1950), an elegiac western chapter-play; the near-documentary State Penitentiary (Lew Landers, 1950); the rousing action serial Pirates of the High Seas (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1950); Chain Gang (Lew Landers, 1950); a hard-boiled exposé of the prison system reminiscent of Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 classic I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; A Yank in Korea (Lew Landers, 1951), covering the then-escalating conflict), Richard Quine’s wartime drama Purple Heart Diary (1951); Last Train from Bombay (Fred F. Sears, 1952), an exotic thriller; Fred F. Sears’ The 49th Man, an essay in Cold War atomic paranoia; and The Saracen Blade (William Castle, 1954), a rousing costume drama; and Castle’s The Iron Glove (1954), which starred Robert Stack in a Technicolor swashbuckler, done in typical Katzman fashion. In many respects, Katzman’s films proved an apt training ground for young directors; if you could work for Katzman and make something worthwhile, you could work for the majors, with their relaxed schedules, without a problem.
Columbia sometimes used the Katzman unit as a threat. When Columbia president Harry Cohn wanted to break an actor's contract, he gave the actor a Katzman script. Everyone knew Katzman as a "schlock" producer, and Cohn knew full well that the actor would refuse the lowbrow script, giving Cohn cause to terminate the contract without penalty. This ploy backfired in 1951 when Cohn owed Lucille Ball $85,000 and one feature film. He sent Ball the script of a formula Arabian Nights fantasy, The Magic Carpet, confident that Ball would decline. Ball recounted her next move in her memoir, Love, Lucy: "I had never feuded with a studio before and I wasn't about to earn the reputation of being difficult at this late date. I picked up the phone and called Harry Cohn. 'I've just read the Sam Katzman script,' I crooned into his ear. 'I think it's marvelous! I'd be delighted to do it.' 'You would?' Mr. Cohn almost fell over backward and poor Sam Katzman just about had a coronary... My salary ate up half Katzman's budget." Undaunted, Katzman and Columbia house director Lew Landers made the film in color, using costumes and sets left over from other, more lavish productions.
