Irwin Allen
Irwin Allen was an American film and television producer and director, known for his work in science fiction, then later as the "Master of Disaster" for his work in the disaster film genre. His most successful productions were The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. He also created and produced the popular 1960s science-fiction television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.
Biography
Early life
Irwin Allen was born in New York City, the son of poor Jewish immigrants from Russia. He majored in journalism and advertising at Columbia University after attending City College of New York for a year. He left college because of financial difficulties caused by the Great Depression.Radio and journalism
Allen moved to Hollywood in 1938, where he edited Key magazine followed by an 11-year stint producing his own program at radio station KLAC. The success of the radio show led to him being offered his own gossip column, "Hollywood Merry-Go-Round", which was syndicated to 73 newspapers.He produced his first TV program, a celebrity panel show also called Hollywood Merry-Go-Round with announcer, and later Tonight Show host, Steve Allen, before moving into film production.
RKO
Allen became involved in film production at a time when power was beginning to shift from studios to talent agencies. He put together packages consisting of directors, actors, and a script, and sold them to film studios.Allen's first film as producer was Where Danger Lives with Robert Mitchum, directed by John Farrow and written by Charles Bennett. Allen produced it with Irving Cummings, Jr. The two men made two more films for RKO: Double Dynamite with Jane Russell, Groucho Marx, and Frank Sinatra, and A Girl in Every Port, again with Marx and William Bendix.
Allen made his directorial debut with the documentary, The Sea Around Us. This was based on Rachel Carson's best-selling book of the same name. It largely used stock footage and won the 1952 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Carson was so disappointed with Allen's final version of the script that she never again sold film rights to her work. The film includes gory images of whales being killed. It was a success, making a profit over $2 million.
Allen returned to producing with the three-dimensional film Dangerous Mission, his final film for RKO. It starred Victor Mature, Bendix, Piper Laurie, and Vincent Price.
Warner Brothers
Allen directed a semidocumentary about the evolution of life, The Animal World. Again, making use of stock footage, but he also included a 9-minute stop-motion dinosaur sequence by Ray Harryhausen. Before release, he toned down the gore from both the live action and the animation.The film was released by Warner Bros. So was Allen's next film, The Story of Mankind, a very loose adaptation of the Hendrik Willem van Loon book of the same name. It featured cameos from the Marx Brothers, Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr, Vincent Price, and Dennis Hopper. The actors were each paid $2,500 for a single day's work with Allen relying on stock footage for the rest of the film.
Allen co-wrote and produced The Big Circus for Allied Artists Pictures with Mature, Red Buttons, Peter Lorre, and Price. Allen was interested in making "an exciting, colorful show – something the public can't see on television." Allen was fascinated by circuses as a child and briefly worked as a carnival barker at age 16. In addition to The Big Circus, he worked circus-themed episodes into his TV programs Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and would try for years to get a widescreen, 3-D project called Circus, Circus, Circus into theaters.
20th Century Fox
Films as director
Allen then went to 20th Century Fox, where he co-wrote, produced, and directed three films: The Lost World, from the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Five Weeks in a Balloon.Willis O'Brien, who had also worked on the pioneering special effects of the original Lost World and King Kong films, was disappointed when Allen opted to save time by using live alligators and lizards instead of stop-motion animation for the film's dinosaurs. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was a scientifically dubious, Jules Verne-style adventure to save the world from a burning Van Allen belt. It was the basis for his later television series of the same name. The family film, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was a loose adaptation of the Verne novel. Lost World was a moderate hit and Voyage was very successful. Five Weeks was a box-office disappointment.
Television series
With 20th Century Fox scaling back their film productions due to their huge expenditure on films such as Cleopatra, in the mid-1960s, Allen concentrated on television, producing several overlapping science-fiction series for 20th Century Fox Television. They featured special effects by L. B. Abbott, who won three Emmys for his work. Allen used many of the same craftsmen on his TV shows as he did on his films, including composer John Williams and costume designer and general assistant Paul Zastupnevich.Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea established Allen's reputation as a television producer. The financial viability of the series was assisted by the reuse of many of the sets from the film; the cost of the Seaview submarine sets alone exceeded the budget of a typical pilot show of the era. The series also benefited from Allen's by-now notorious use of stock film footage, particularly from Hell and High Water, The Enemy Below, and Allen's The Lost World.
Allen had originally intended Lost in Space to be a family show, a science-fiction version of The Swiss Family Robinson. It quickly developed into a children's show with episodes concentrating on the young Will Robinson, the robot, and especially, the comic villain, Dr. Smith. The show used several science-fiction elements that have since become common, such as the comic robot or android, the heroic child, and the wacky, lovable alien.
The Time Tunnel, with each episode set in a different historical time period, was an ideal vehicle for Allen's talent for smoothly mixing live action with stock footage from films set in the same period. A change in network management led to the show being cancelled after just one season. Allen cited The Time Tunnel as his favorite of all of his television productions and he would attempt to revamp and relaunch the concept numerous times including a filmed pilot in 1976 called The Time Travelers and unfilmed concepts that included one called Time Travel Agency and another called The Time Project that went through several incarnations.
Land of the Giants was the most expensive show of its day at roughly $250,000 per episode. As another castaway-themed show, Allen incorporated some of the successful elements from Lost in Space, although this time he did not allow the treacherous character to dominate the series.
Television films
Allen also produced several television films, such as City Beneath the Sea, which recycled many props and models from Voyage, Lost in Space, and The Man from the 25th Century. Though intended as a pilot for a new TV series project, his small-screen success from the 1960s largely eluded him in the 1970s.Lost in Spaces Bill Mumy said of Allen that, while he was very good at writing television pilots that sold, his unwillingness to spend money hurt his shows' quality once on the air. A monster costume that appeared on one of his shows, for example, would appear on another a few weeks later with new paint. Writer Jon Abbott described Allen as paradoxical. "Here was a man who, when told the cost of a spaceship for a Lost in Space alien, snapped, 'Let him walk!'... and then let the show be cancelled rather than take a cut in the budget".
In 1969, Allen signed a three-picture deal with Avco Embassy to make The Poseidon Adventure, No Man's World, and Almost Midnight, but the deal did not lead to any films there.
''The Poseidon Adventure'' and ''The Towering Inferno''
In the 1970s, Allen produced the most successful films of his career: The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, directing the action scenes for both. Their showmanship was compared to that of P. T. Barnum and Cecil B. DeMille, and they prompted scholarly analysis of the subsequent popularity of the disaster genre.The Poseidon Adventure was based on the Paul Gallico novel of the same name and directed by Ronald Neame. Unable to find a studio to fully back the venture, Allen raised half the $5 million budget, with 20th Century-Fox putting up the rest; the film eventually grossed over $100 million. L. B. Abbott and A. D. Flowers won a Special Achievement Academy Award for the film's optical and physical effects.
Allen hoped to follow up on the success of The Poseidon Adventure with a film based on the novel The Tower, but the film rights had already been taken by Warner Bros. He looked for an alternative and found a similar story in The Glass Inferno. Rather than produce competing movies, 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. agreed to coproduce The Towering Inferno with a script based on both novels and a $14 million budget. It was the first time two major studios made a film together, splitting the costs. Despite its nearly three-hour run time, the film, directed by John Guillermin, was a hit and won three Academy Awards.
Final television films for Fox
The success of the films led to Allen receiving an offer to make three television films. "I missed television", said Allen. "There's a hysteria and an excitement in television that exists nowhere else in business."Each was made for Fox television at a budget of $1 million with a view to possibly going to series. They screened on different networks: Adventures of the Queen, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Time Travelers. Only Swiss Family was picked up for a series, running for 20 episodes.