3: Happy 110th Birthday, Val Lewton
You Must Remember This
Karina Longworth
4.6 • 15.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2014
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Very Special Halloween Episode! The writer-producer Val Lewton produced and ghost-wrote 11 films in just three years as head of the horror unit at RKO, many of which — Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher — were huge hits, helping to keep the troubled studio afloat in the early 1940s, and becoming influential genre film classics. Lewton died super young, but he crammed an enormous amount of life into his 46 years. Before establishing his unique style of horror at RKO, he was a publicist and a terrible journalist; he published at least a dozen books (including at least two porno novels, one of which he was very proud of), and through his career-making apprenticeship with David O. Selznick, collaborated with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and countless other classical Hollywood luminaries. Today — which would have been Lewton’s 110th birthday, if not for his untimely death in 1951 — we take a look back at his life and career, break down his groundbreaking aesthetic, and ask and answer an incredibly reductive question: did Hollywood kill Val Lewton?
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This. |
| 0:29.1 | To celebrate this very spooky time of the year, today we go back to the first half of the 20th century. |
| 0:53.1 | To tell the story of writer producer Val Luton. |
| 1:00.1 | Had Luton not died in 1951, he would be celebrating his 110th birthday on May 7th. |
| 1:08.1 | You may be saying to yourself, Val Huton, but if you're a fan of horror movies, chances are you're familiar with Luton's work. |
| 1:17.1 | Either you've seen movies he produced, like Cat People. |
| 1:27.1 | A legend of the cat. |
| 1:35.1 | I walked with a zombie. |
| 1:45.1 | Or maybe you've seen a direct remake of a Luton film, like Paul Schrader's Cat People. |
| 1:50.1 | Or a film clearly bearing Luton's influence, like Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, or Howard Hawks' The Thing. |
| 2:00.1 | But there are reasons to care about Luton even if horror isn't your thing. |
| 2:04.1 | For one thing, a lot of his so-called horror movies weren't really strictly horror movies at all. |
| 2:10.1 | They were noirs, melodramas, psychodramas, even social issue parables, wrapped up in more salable genre trappings, so the studio could make its money back. |
| 2:24.1 | Luton was kind of a zealot character. |
| 2:27.1 | He was the second generation Hollywood studio employee whose path crossed with legends for 50 years, beginning in the silent era. |
| 2:34.1 | Luton himself worked either directly or on films made by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Wells, John Renoir, Dorothy Parker, Stanley Kramer, George Cooker, and countless other writers and directors. |
| 2:45.1 | He was mentored by David O'Sullsnick, and in turn, Luton gave early and crucial career breaks to Jacques Tuneau, Mark Robson, Kim Hunter, and Robert Wise. |
| 2:56.1 | But Luton wasn't a company guy. In fact, he devoted his career to fighting back against artless studio bureaucracy and creativity crushing bean counting. |
| 3:07.1 | His movies ingeniously made the most of miniscule budgets, while brilliantly subverting the conventional wisdom of Hollywood in his day. |
| 3:14.1 | His obsessive drive to make quality movies and an increasingly broken system made him a legend, and maybe it also killed him. |
| 3:26.1 | Join us, won't you, as we wish a very happy one hundred and tenth birthday to Val Luton. |
| 3:36.1 | Do you want to get the inside scoop on award season? I'm Katie Rich. I'm the Awards and Audio Editor at Vanity Fair. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Karina Longworth, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Karina Longworth and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.