3: Happy 110th Birthday, Val Lewton

This fall, you must remember this is going on tour. I will be traveling to Repertory Cinemas and historic movie houses around the country, showing films like "Ritten on the Wind," "The Mistfits," "Life Boat," plus a number of deeper cuts all discussed on the bisexuals. The new season of "You Must Remember This," which debuts September 15th. I'll be going to Brooklyn, Houston, Boston, Chicago, Kiernan, Nebraska, Savannah, Georgia, and hopefully a city near you. To see all of the locations and dates and to find links where you can buy tickets, go to you must remember thispodcast.com/avents. That's you must remember thispodcast.com/avents. Plus, we have new bisexuals merch, including shirts, hats, and a custom formulated unisex fragrance inspired by jungle gardenia, the now obsolete perfume that was Libby Holman's signature scent. It all goes on sale or pre-order September 15th at you must remember thispodcast.com/shop. That's you must remember thispodcast.com/shop. [Music] Welcome to another episode of "You Must Remember This," thepodcast dedicated to exploring the secrets and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. Part of the Panoply Network. I'm your host, Karina Longworth. To celebrate this very spooky time of the year, today we go back to the first half of the 20th century to tell the story of writer producer Val Luton. [Music] Had Luton not died in 1951, he would be celebrating his 110th birthday on May 7th. 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. Either you've seen movies he produced, like cat people. [Music] Across the centuries comes this exciting story of a modern girl cursed by an ancient legend. A legend of a cat. Women whose kiss means death. Whose love turns them into vicious, naughty pieces. [Music] I walked with a zombie. The tale of terror and voodoo. Of witchcraft and zombies. And all the weird black magic that the white man seldom see. Or maybe you've seen a direct remake of a Luton film, like Paul Schrader's cat people. 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." But there are reasons to care about Luton even if horror isn't your thing. For one thing, a lot of his so-called horror movies weren't really strictly horror movies at all. They were noirs, melodramas, psychodramas, even social issue parables. Wrapped up in more salable genre trappings. So the studio could make its money back. Luton was kind of a zealot character. He was the second generation Hollywood studio employee whose path crossed with legends for 50 years, beginning in the silent era. 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. He was mentored by David O. Selznick, and in turn, Luton gave early and crucial career breaks to Jacques Ternoux, Mark Robson, Kim Hunter, and Robert Wise. 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. His movies ingeniously made the most of miniscule budgets, while brilliantly subverting the conventional wisdom of Hollywood in his day. His obsessive drive to make quality movies and an increasingly broken system made him a legend. And maybe it also killed him. Join us, won't you? As we wish a very happy one hundred and tenth birthday to Val Luton. Moobie is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. Their films are always hand-picked with the goal of curating and elevating visionary filmmaking, such as passages, the 2023 feature directed by Iris Axe, which was one of my personal favorite films of the last few years. You might have seen Iris Axe's most recent theatrically released film, Peter Hujar's Day, but a few years ago passages one best feature at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. It stars Peter Hujar star Ben Wishaw, Franz Rigowski, and Adele Exercopolis, who won the Palm Door for Blue is the Warmest Color. This seductive drama set in Paris tells the story of Tomas and Martin, a gay couple whose marriage is thrown into crisis when Tomas begins a passionate affair with a younger woman named Agat. This is a fresh, sexy, and brutally funny take on messy modern relationships, and the perfect companion piece to The Bisexuals, our current season of you must remember this. You can try Moobie free for 30 days at Moobie.com/ymrt. That's m-u-b-i-dot-com/y-m-r-t for a month of great cinema for free. Val Luden was born Vladimir Leventon in 1904 in Yalta, on the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula. Luden came from a superstitious culture with a strong storytelling tradition that normalized the supernatural. From a very early age, he had two fears, cats, and being touched. As an adult, Luden used the term "adavistic" to describe the types of fears familiar to him, which he tried to inject into his movies. Adavistic literally means related to the ancestral. In Luden's movies, there's often a sense that characters have been saddled with something bigger than them, and affliction they have no control over. Their present is haunted and halted, directly or indirectly, by the past. Luden would become an unlikely second-generation Hollywood creative. His mother was the sister of Alan Esemova, who would eventually go on to become one of the first great silent film stars. His father was a cad. Eventually, Val's mom, Nina Leventon, gave up on her deadbeat husband, gathered up her kids, and moved on. She never spoke of or to her husband again, and eventually, Esemova paid for the family's passage to New York, and convinced them to Americanize Leventon to Luden. Living in upstate New York with his aunt, mom, and sister, little Val struggled with out of male influence. His photographic memory was an evidence as early as age 7 when he started devouring novels, and as a teen, he'd go to local community basketball games, stand up at halftime, and recite passages of serenote until he was hauled off for being a public nuisance. Esemova sent him to two military schools. He was a teenage newspaper man working at papers in Connecticut and to in New York, and he was disastrous of it, exaggerating westward stories, or just making them up. In 1937, Luden read a slightly tongue-in-cheek, although accurate, accounting of his work experience to date, and here's how he described his "none too illustrious beginnings as a writer." "I was fired from each of the papers, and acquired a reputation as one of the world's worst reporters. In accuracy, seemed to be my besetting sin and impudence, which I could never understand, ran at a close second. I was fired from the New York Morning World for insulting Henry Ford by asking him for a million dollars. I still think I was right." His mom had been working in the New York Story office at MGM since the heyday of Nazemova, and she eventually got her son a job in the publicity department at the studio, where he exhibited a gift for fabricating bios and interviews in the voice of stars. Meanwhile, he moonlighted as the author of "Cheepy Paperbacks." He wrote detective novels, historical fiction, smut. He bragged that his porno novel, Yasmin. "It's said to be one of the most beautifully illustrated books ever published, and retails for $75 a copy." In 1932, Luden had a big hit with no bit of her own, which became known as the first popular novel to reflect the Great Depression. Although, its success probably owed more to its racy, uncensored plot about out-of-work secretaries forced to turn to hooking than to any social relevancy. Paramount bought the movie rights, cast Clark Abel and Carol Lumbard, and then at the behest of Hollywood censorship office completely changed the plot and even tweaked the title. By the time no man of her own was released, it had nothing to do with Luden's source. But the success of No Bed of Her Own got Ludin a contract to write four additional novels within a year. He had to quit his job at MGM in order to make it happen. For three of the novels, he took the pen name Carlos Keith, which he'd also use later to mask a few screenwriting efforts. He still had eyes on working in the movies. His heroes in Hollywood were the boy wonder second generation of studio moguls, Thalberg, Zannick, David O'Cell's Nick. In 1932, Cells Nick decided to honor his own Ukrainian heritage by developing an adaptation of Gogol's Terrace Bulba. His first call was to fellow Ukrainian Nina Ludin, who was still running MGM's story department out of New York. Nina Ludin prepared for Cells Nick a list of five potential Russian-born and Hollywood established writers for the adaptation. And then she tacked on her son's name because what the hell? As luck would have it, the other five guys turned the project down. And Val Ludin had his first Hollywood writing job. Ludin and his wife Ruth moved to California, but Cells Nick ultimately scrapped Terrace Bulba. Instead, Cells Nick offered Ludin a salary of $75 a week to be his personal assistant. Ludin snatched the chance, assuming it was the first round on a ladder. Thalberg had started as Carl Lemley's secretary, so there was precedent for moving up from such positions. Cells Nick did promote Ludin to story editor, but it was kind of a thankless job. Cells Nick was a notorious bully who seemed to delight in playing power games with his underlings. It was Ludin who came up with a famous shot and gone with the wind with a camera rising above the countless bodies of soldiers at the Atlanta Depot. Cells Nick repaid this gift at the film's first preview by making Ludin stand outside the door of the men's room with a stopwatch, collecting data so that Cells Nick could figure out the appropriate length for the intermission. Ludin stayed with Cells Nick for eight years, contributing invaluable to big films like Anna Karanina and David Copperfield for no credit. Why didn't he leave? Maybe because he was terrified of authority, Ludin once promised his wife, Ruth, that he'd ask for a raise, only to totally chicken out when he got to the studio. Instead, Ludin landed a quickie book contract for $500 and secretly wrote a novel so that he could have an extra $25 a week cash to slip into his own pay envelope and tell his wife that the raise had gone through. Throughout his career, Ludin would talk back to his superiors through means so subversive they essentially qualified as a private language. He'd make a big show of being way too polite and even theatrically subservient to many and no respect for, referring to them as "sir" or "mister" in situations where everyone else was using first names. He had a purple paisley tie which he referred to as his "dog puke" tie and he'd wear it around anyone to whom he felt intellectually superior, assuming that they would either understand it as a clear sign of contempt or else he knew they were a fool. Ludin would carry this attitude toward anyone in a position of power over him through most of his career while at the same time, tacking away from Cells Nick's example when it came to anyone Ludin himself managed. He was beyond gracious, encouraging and fiercely loyal to his own employees. Ludin was nothing if not a man of contradictions and some of his closest collaborators have suggested that he'd thrived off of situations like the one he was in with Cells Nick because Ludin needed an enemy. So even when another offer came along, Ludin was hesitant to leave Cells Nick's employee behind, especially since that offer didn't immediately look like a great or even a logical one. In the early 1940s, RKO was in trouble. They'd just lost tons of money on Orson Walsh's Citizen Kane and the Magnificent Embersons, the well of a stair Rogers musicals that had kept the studio flush through the depression had finally run dry. But there'd be movies like the Mystery Series, The Saints? They were doing all right. And head of production Charles Corner wondered if a horror unit might not offer the quick influx of cash that RKO was so desperately looking for. Corner looked at Universal, a rival studio about the same size as RKO, and saw how cheap monster movies had bolstered the bottom line over there for nearly a decade, starting with Dracula and Frankenstein. These movies could be made for almost nothing. They did huge initial business, and they had life. Just when it seemed at the end of the 1930s at the horror fad and run its course, Universal had re-released Dracula and Frankenstein as a double feature, and the Twin Bill became the surprise box off his head of the summer. He responded by rushing new monster movies into production, leading to The Wolf Man, which was released in 1941, and broke box office records into the next year. It makes total sense that RKO would want to start producing horror movies. But why did they want Val Ludin to do the job? That's not quite clear. He didn't exactly have a horror background. Almost all of the work Ludin had done for Sel's Nick was literary in nature, producing the second unit shoot on a tale of two cities, packaging an adaptation of Jane Eyre. The truth of how Ludin ended up at RKO has been lost behind Ludin's joke version of the story. Someone told RKO a written horrible novels. He said, "They missed a horrible for horror, and I got the job." Dunblond is where we talk about all the things everybody else is thinking, but is too scared to say out loud. I'm BunnyXO, and every week I'm sitting down for real unfiltered conversations with guests like Dolly Parton, Machine Gun Kelly, Denise Richards, plus, you never know what's gonna come out during Ashtalk and Thess. We laugh, we overshare, and maybe heal a little along the way. Follow and listen to Dunblond wherever you get podcasts. The first thing Ludin did when he joined RKO in 1942 was to give himself a crash course in the history of the horror genre, running a number of prints and making note of things he wanted to borrow, and also what he didn't want to do. A lot of the horror movies of the 1930s had employed German craftsmen who had fled the Nazis and found a home at Universal, whose founder, Carl Lemley, was happy to give any fellow countryman a job. Ludin was Russian, and he felt he had a much different sensibility. He was more romantic, more poetic, he was also less efficient, and in Somniak he could rarely do any real work during office hours and would instead stay up all night, writing and researching and rewriting. One thing his horror movie marathon taught him, Ludin didn't like the Universal House style, and he became all the more set against it when the Saturday evening post published a puff piece featuring Universal's 7-point formula for a successful scare pick. 4. Besides the major monster, there must be a secondary character of weird appearance, such as Igor. RKO would have been happy for Ludin to rip off this formula to the letter, but he was determined to defy it. They may think I'm going to do the usual "chiller" stuff, which will make a quick profit, be laughed at and be forgotten, but I'm going to make the kind of suspense movies I like. RKO gave Ludin free reign to do just that, within a pretty strict set of parameters. Each movie was to be a B-programmer, meaning that it was designed to go on a double bill, run no more than 75 minutes, and cost no more than $150,000. They had to be horror movies, and if they weren't they'd be marketed as such. RKO would supply test marketed titles, which Ludin would use as a starting point, and build the film from there. The only ever credited as a writer under his pen name Carlos Keith, Ludin played an extraordinary role in shaping the stories and characters in his movies, animating them around his personal pet themes. And though he employed several different directors and never took on those duties himself, there's certain commonalities to most of the films Ludin produced, visual and structural elements that can be isolated the same way auteurists connect the dots on a director's body of work. The most commonly cited Ludin-esque trait is his use of lighting, or lack thereof, to suggest scares, while obscuring the frayed edges of his shoestring budgets. In Vincent Manelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, Kirk Douglas plays Jonathan Shields, a B-movie producer-turned-mogal who was mostly based on Ludin's former mentor David O'Cell's Nick, but the first part of the film has Shields taking over a B-unit, where he gets an assignment bearing striking similarity to Ludin's own first film at RKO, cat people. With five men dressed like cats on the screen, what do they look like? Like five men dressed like cats. When an audience pays to see a picture like this, what do they pay for? To get the pay scale of them. And what scares the human race more than any other single thing? The dark. Of course, and why? Because the dark has a light that's own. And the dark, all sorts of things come alive. Suppose, suppose we never do show the cat men. Is that what you're thinking? Exactly. No cat men. All right. Now, what we put on the screen, it'll make the backs of their next crawl. Two eyes, shining in the dark. use of darkness and shadow in a number of his films, starting with cat people. Starring French beauty Simone Simone as a Serbian illustrator who fears submitting to sex will literally transform her into a wild animal, the film teases and implies a lurking menace, building tension throughout, but it withholds the monster money shot until the very end of the film. Ludan milked much dread from putting actors in murkly lit spaces and then having them behave as though they felt an unmistakable menace lurking in the dark, which neither the characters nor the viewer could precisely define, which made said menace all the more unsettling. I'll tell you a secret. Ludan told the LA Times. If you make the screen dark enough, the mind's eye will read into it anything you want. Ludan's films also masterfully use sound design and editing to provide shock and misdirection. At one point in cat people, Alice, Simone Simone's character's rival for the affections of her husband, is walking alone at night. She hears a woman's footsteps behind her, though she can't see anyone in the dark. She becomes convinced she's being followed, suddenly the sound of footsteps stops. The silence becomes more terrifying than the sound, and Alice starts to run. Using an intersection, she and we hear the hiss of what could be a large jungle cat. But turns out to be a city bus, slamming on its brakes. Though editor Mark Robson designed this scene, Ludan would use it as a model for shock moments throughout his career. The producer called such devices "buses." This amount was cast for what Ludan called her "little kitten face," which he described as being cute, and soft, and cuddly, and seemingly not at all dangerous. This quality of apparent innocence was used to powerful effect. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that Simone's Ivina is the film's monster, she never really stops being the sympathetic heroine. The so-called heroes of the movie, her husband Oliver and his besotted coworker Alice, end up seeming almost sinister in their lack of internal conflict. This was another Ludan hallmark, his antagonists were always fully humanized, even when their characters themselves weren't fully human. Most of the characters in Ludan's movies seem to live for lives, even as they're inexplicably drawn to death. Ludan was put through something pretty similar after the success of Cat People, although the ostensible sequel to that film was still a few years off. The title assigned for his unit's second picture was seemingly worse. I walked with a zombie. Ludan emerged from his assignment meeting in the words of Mark Robson, "impossibly gloomy." But after another no doubt sleepless night, Ludan returned to the studio the next morning, exuberant with inspiration. "We'll do it as a remake of Jane Eyre with Voodoo." Ludan may have mocked the Universal Formula, but he also came up with his own set of rules, designed to breathe life into whatever space he could carve out under our KO's restrictions. No grizzly stuff for us, no horror, piled on horror. You can't keep up horror that's long sustained. It becomes something to laugh at, but take a sweet love story or story of sexual antagonisms about people like the rest of us, not freaks, and cut in your horror here and there by suggestion, and you've got something. Three scenes have suggested horror and one of actual violence, fade out. It's all over in less than 70 minutes. Ludan's unit made three films in its first year. Cat people, I walked with a zombie and the leopard man. All of them directed by Jacques Turner. Cat people was the biggest phenom, but all of them made money. And Turner was subsequently promoted to A-movies. Ludan was offered a promotion too, meaning bigger budgets and ostensibly no more silly titles around which he'd have to invent material. Ludan was happy with what he was doing, but he longed for respect. Something he felt he could never get, as long as he was forced to make movies with words like "Zombie" in the title. But when Ludan insisted that editor Mark Robb Zimbe promoted to direct his next movie, Archaeobocht, they were unwilling to allow a first timer to help an A-picture. So Ludan turned down his own promotion, choosing loyalty to his friend and collaborator, even if it meant being stuck in the be ghetto. He was starting to realize that he had more freedom if he was barely costing Archaeobo any money. Ludan's next string of films would lack the visual sumptuousness of the movies he made with Turner, but they'd allow Ludan to delve more deeply into his own personal demons and concerns, often while playing some kind of game of bait and switch, giving Archaeobocht's marketing department just enough of a horror veneer to work with while actually combining and defying definitions of genre. Some of these films included the devil worshipping cult Protonwar, the seventh victim, which prefigures the big sleep in its storytelling and psycho in its shower scene, the ghost ship, an atmospheric psycho mystery on the dangers of abuse of power and isolation, and the curse of the cat people, a would-be sequel which was really more of a metaphoric wartime family drama, sort of in the vein of meet me in Saint Louis. Simone Simone was brought back as the ghost of arena, visible only to the young daughter of Arena's ex-husband Oliver and his new wife Alice. Oliver and Alice, having survived the events of cat people, are now living in a wartime fantasy of domestic suburban bliss. But their daughter is drawn to the snow-blinketed backyard where Arena appears, shrouded in a white cape, still as a statue, so unmoving as to resemble a religious icon. The curse of the cat people's emphasis on its ghost's stillness, established a major lutean trope, was another break away from the universal style horror formula, which was all about creatures who shouldn't be able to move, the dead, coming to life and chasing people around. The dead arena is haunting, but hardly a frightening presence. She's an almost seductive contrast to the antiseptic bubble of the American family engaged in wholesome activity. This was lutean turning his experience, feeling like an outsider in Hollywood, and the experience of anyone who felt outside of, or not entirely comfortable with, the propagandistic aspect of American life during World War II, into metaphor. In a climate obsessed with the illusion of defeating evil through "do your part" action, what could be more eerie and out of place than being unable to move? Lutean's two biggest champions amongst film critics, were many Farber and James A.G., and both understood that Lutean was taking the commercial mandate to make a sequel and spinning it into something special. Farber noted curse of the cat people's unusual dignity, and A.G. named both "Cursive the Cat People" and another Lutean production, Youth Run's Wild, as the best fiction films of 1944. On the latter count, Lutean and the critic disagreed. Youth Run's Wild had been Lutean's attempt to make a serious issue movie about the struggles of growing up in wartime America in a guise of a juvenile delinquency exploitation flick, but RKO, caving to pressure from the reactionary media, took the film away from Lutean and recutded until all that was left was in Lutean's words, "Bennal" and "Silly." The finished movie moved A.G. to compare Lutean to Preston Sturges. He declared that Lutean's "feeling for cinema" is quite as deep and spontaneous as that of Sturges, and is feeling for human beings and how to bring them to life on screen is deeper. He was a first-rate stinger, "Lutean said. I asked to have my name taken off it, but they refused." This seems to have been the beginning of the end of Lutean's relatively happy-righted RKO, and by extension, the start of the decline of his Hollywood career. The first six months of this year have been as unhappy a period as I've ever gone through. Lutean wrote in a letter to his mother in August 1944. With the studio, everything seemed to go wrong. Lutean's unit was reassigned to the supervision of Jack Gross, who was formerly the head of horror product at Lutean's hated rival, Universal. Then, Lutean's long-time alley Charles Corner suddenly died. Gross swiftly signed his Frankenstein actor Boris Karloff to a three-picture deal, and he insisted that Lutean find a use for him. Eventually, Karloff became a close friend of Lutean's, and a like-minded collaborator on three films. But there's no denying that things were starting to get weird. At the end of one meeting at RKO, a suit from exhibition wagged his finger at Lutean, and intoned, "Remember, no messages." Lutean was livid, but he couldn't come up with a response right away. Back at his own office, Luden did come up with something and placed a call to the suits. "I'm sorry, but we do have a message. Our message is that death is good." Luden re-attacked horror with a vengeance. First, Luden cast Karloff in Isle of the Dead. Then he doubled down, casting both Karloff and Belle Legosi in the grave robbing chiller The Body Snatcher. The Body Snatcher turned out to be a massive hit and it earned rave reviews. That success, finally, after ten films in under three years, convinced RKO to give Luden a real A-level budget and schedule for his next film. That movie, Bedlam, starred Karloff as a charismatically sinister warden of an insane asylum during the age of reason. Compared to the visually stunning, sustained mood pieces like zombie and the cat movies, Bedlam is kind of a bore, but it has a few incredible sequences, including one in which Karloff forces an inmate, doused head to toe in toxic gold paint to play the voice of reason to amuse a party full of rich assholes. The so-called "gilded boy" can't breathe under the metallic paint, and in the midst of his agonizing, croaked out recitation, he slowly loses consciousness, and finally drops dead in front of the very amused audience's eyes. "You know that anyone painted over as thick as that poor lad will die." "If I understand you properly, this boy is dying, this boy is dead because his paws are clogged by the guilt. Well then, sweet mistress boy, and since he was such a stickler for the correct definition, you were roughly the legal fact that this boy died by his own exhalation. You might say he poisoned himself." What's unusual and pointed particularly for a lutein film is that this horrific death happens in plain sight in broad daylight, framed square in front of the camera. From the vantage of today, it's not hard to draw parallels between the gilded boys completely unnecessary death while performing under duress for the sadistically powerful and lutein's own untimely demise. Bedlam was released in 1946. It would be lutein's last film at RKO, and in five years, he would be dead. After Bedlam, lutein tried to get a number of films off the ground. He tried to make a musical, but production was delayed so that a dozen chorus girls could bulk up to Kankan era proportions. There was an ill-fated, Boris Karloff starring Blackbeard. Lutein met several times with director Jean Renoir on the project which eventually became woman on the beach. But Lutein was long gone by the time that movie was made. In November 1945, Lutein suffered his first heart attack. The cause was identified as exhaustion. He took a leave from RKO and then left the studio for what looked like a golden deal at Paramount. But as Bedlam taught us, all the glitters, you know. Lutein spent his first six months at Paramount working up a Dickens adaptation, only to be finally told that Dickens would not sell. Feeling pressured to get something, anything going. Lutein rushed a romance, my own true love, into production. Only to watch helplessly as Paramount and his lead actress blocked his every creative move. The movie was a financial disaster. Lutein's first money looser. And after that, the fatalist and Lutein suspected that Paramount would run out his contract, without letting him get another movie off the ground. He was right. In July 1948, Lutein hopped to MGM where he spent half his time waiting around for permission to work, produce a terrible Debra Carr comedy, and then was out the door. Robert Weiss and Mark Robson, now at hunt points in their careers, paid Lutein back for helping to get them started in Hollywood by inviting him to join them in an indie venture called Aspen Productions. And then, they dropped Lutein for being too slow to develop material. They didn't even break the news themselves. They sent an agent to do it. Lutein was devastated and sunk into a paranoid depression. Even setting aside the betrayal of his friends and protégés, without a job, the workaholic Lutein started to go a little bit nuts. Finally, in the summer of 1950, Universal gave Lutein a job producing a western. A patchy drums, he bragged, was "the cheapest technicolor film ever made with real actors." Lutein was then offered a job producing for Stanley Kramer, but his gallstone started acting up. A couple of months later, Lutein severed his second and third heart attacks. Val Lutein died on March 14, 1951, at the age of 46. Those close to Lutein believed that his work absolutely contributed to his death. Or more precisely, the struggles he sustained trying to make work that he believed in, the stress that stemmed from his need to position himself as an antagonist to the system that employed him. His secretary, Verna de Mont, said Lutein wasn't cut out for the business of Hollywood. He took things much too seriously, she said. He didn't know how to play the angles. At his funeral, Lutein's close friend, actor Alan Napier, gave a eulogy slamming the industry for exploiting Lutein rather than supporting his vision. Robert Wise put it bluntly. He said, "The motion picture business literally killed Val." When tragedy strikes in real life or in the movies, everybody looks for someone to blame. In life, Val Lutein couldn't help but foster antagonistic relationships with monolithic Hollywood power. In order to feel that charge of being the underdog, he had to make all the big dogs into the enemy. But isn't that all the more reason to think that in death, Lutein wouldn't want to be seen as the victim of the Hollywood law, as though he was some helpless little starlet who got chewed up because he didn't know how to protect himself? Val Lutein wasn't the gilded boy. Nobody pushed him to work as hard as he did against his will. Remember, this is a guy who believed he was grappling with addivistic fears, personal demons that went back far into his bloodline. This is the guy who infused almost all of his movies with the idea of an irrational, sometimes ancestral attraction to death. This is the guy who told off one of his bosses with the line, "Our message is that death is good." Did Hollywood kill Val Lutein? Or did it give him a venue for creatively expressing his instinct that he wasn't long for this world through an extraordinary body of work cranked out in a very short period of time? We may never know. But let's give the last word to Lutein himself, from his most oblique treatment of the death drive, the seventh victim. At the very end of the film, Jacqueline, the mysterious beauty who has been running from devil worshipers who are trying to get her to kill herself, admits that she's always wanted to die. We know she keeps a news in her apartment, hanging over a chair. Through the closed door, we hear the chair fall to the ground. She's chosen death on her own terms. The music swells. It's all over in less than 75 minutes. Thanks for listening to You Must Remember This. Today's special guest stars included Mark Olson, who played Val Lutein, and Noah Segan, who played the unnamed executive at RKO. This episode was written, narrated and edited by Karina Longworth. That's me. You can find more episodes and more information about this episode at our website. You must remember this podcast dot com. Join us next time for another tale from the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. Good night. [Music]