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Irving Lerner

{{short description|American film director}}

{{Infobox person

| name = Irving Lerner

| image =

| alt =

| caption =

| birth_date = {{birth date|1909|03|07}}

| birth_place = New York City, New York, United States

| death_date = {{Death date and age|1976|12|25|1909|03|07}}

| death_place = Los Angeles, California, United States

| nationality =

| other_names =

| known_for = blacklisted during the McCarthy period

| occupation = Film director

}}

Irving Lerner (March 7, 1909 – December 25, 1976) was an American film director.

Biography

Before becoming a filmmaker, Lerner was a research editor for Columbia University's Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, getting his start in film by making documentaries for the anthropology department. In the early 1930s, he was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League, and later, Frontier Films. He made films for the Rockefeller Foundation and other academic institutions, becoming a film editor and second-unit director involved with the emerging American documentary movement of the late 1930s. Lerner produced two documentaries for the Office of War Information during WW II and after the war became the head of New York University's Educational Film Institute. In 1948, Lerner and Joseph Strick shared directorial chores on a short documentary, Muscle Beach. Lerner then turned to low-budget, quickly filmed features. When not hastily making his own thrillers, Lerner worked as a technical advisor, a second-unit director, a co-editor and an editor.

Lerner was cinematographer, director, or assistant director on both fiction and documentary films such as ...One Third of a Nation... (1939), Valley Town (1940), The Land (1942) directed by Robert Flaherty, and Suicide Attack (1950). Lerner was also producer of the OWI documentary Hymn of the Nations (1944), directed by Alexander Hammid, and featuring Arturo Toscanini. He was co-director with Joseph Strick of the short documentary Muscle Beach (1948).

Irving Lerner was also a director and film editor with directing credits such as Studs Lonigan (1960) and editing credits such as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). Lerner died during the editing of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977), and the film was dedicated to him.

Legacy

Three of Lerner's films—A Place to Live, Muscle Beach, and Hymn of the Nations—were preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007, 2009 and 2010, respectively.{{cite web|title=Preserved Projects|url=https://www.oscars.org/academy-film-archive/preserved-projects?title=&filmmaker=Lerner%2C+irving&category=All&collection=All|website=Academy Film Archive}}

Alleged Soviet espionage

Irving Lerner was an American citizen and an employee of the United States Office of War Information during World War II, and he worked in the Motion Picture Division. Lerner allegedly was involved in espionage on behalf of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU); Arthur Adams, a trained engineer and experienced spy who escaped to the Soviet Union in 1946, was Lerner's key contact.{{Cite book|url = https://books.google.com/books?id=M8p00bTFvRkC|title = Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America|last = Haynes|first = John Earl|date = 1999-01-01|publisher = Yale University Press|isbn = 0300129874|language = en}}

In the winter of 1944, a counterintelligence officer caught Lerner attempting to photograph the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory; Lerner was acting without authorization.{{Cite book|last=Miklitsch|first=Robert|title=The Red and Black" American Film Noir in the 1950s|publisher=University of Illinois Press|year=2017}} The model for the cyclotron was used for the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for uranium enrichment; and, research work at Stanford using the cyclotron led to the Manhattan Project at Hanford, Washington, dedicated to producing plutonium for the bomb dropped in Nagasaki.{{Cite web|url=https://www.atomicheritage.org/location/university-california-berkeley|title=University of California, Berkeley|website=Atomic Heritage Foundation|language=en|access-date=2020-04-14}} Lerner resigned and went to work with Joseph Strick for Keynote Records, owned by Eric Bernay, another Soviet intelligence contact. Arthur Adams, who ran Irving as an agent, also worked at Keynote.

Filmography

As Director

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As Producer

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As Editor

  • Mustang: The House That Joe Built (1978)
  • The River Niger (1976)
  • Steppenwolf (1974)
  • Spartacus (1960, uncredited){{cite book |title=Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television 1950-2002 |last1=Buhle |first1=Paul |last2=Wagner |first2=David |year=2003 |publisher=Palgrave MacMillan |page=[https://archive.org/details/hideinplainsight00buhl/page/173 173] |isbn=978-1-4039-6144-0 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/hideinplainsight00buhl/page/173 }}
  • The Marines Come Thru (1938)
  • China Strikes Back (1937, unconfirmed)

As Second Unit Director or Assistant Director

As Actor

As Miscellaneous Crew

Editing Department

Production Manager

As Cinematographer

Dedicatee

See also

References

Notes

{{reflist}}

Bibliography

  • Frontier Films: Members [https://web.archive.org/web/20191023170858/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/Huffman/Frontier/others.html]
  • FBI memo, "Soviet Activities in the United States," 25 July 1946, Papers of Clark Clifford, Harry S. Truman Library
  • John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999), pg. 325

Further reading

  • Westphal, Kyle (March 25, 2013) [https://www.chicagofilmsociety.org/2013/03/25/irving-lerner-a-career-in-context/ "Irving Lerner: A Career in Context"] Chicago Film Society
  • Gustafson, Frederick July 7, 2017 [https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2017/07/irving-lerner.html On Film: Irving Lerner]

External links

  • {{IMDb name|0503615}}

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{{Irving Lerner}}

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Category:1909 births

Category:1976 deaths

Category:Film directors from New York City

Category:American cinematographers