Walter Wanger (born Walter Feuchtwanger; July 11, 1894 – November 18, 1968) was an American film producer. A two-time recipient of the Academy Honorary Award, he was active from the 1920s until his career concluded with the turbulent production of Cleopatra, his last film, in 1963. Strongly influenced by European films, Wanger developed a reputation as an intellectual, socially conscious film producer who spearheaded controversial but politically provocative message films and romantic melodramas. Throughout his career, he made eloquent statements about the social responsibilities of the filmmaker and his educational role in a democracy.
Born in 1894, Wanger attended Dartmouth College, where he briefly headed their theatre department. Wanger next served in the U.S. Army during World War I as an aviation pilot. During the early 1920s, Wanger joined Paramount Pictures, where he acquired the rights to The Shiek (1921). He quickly became one of Paramount's top production executives before he left due to management disputes. In 1931, he became a vice president for Columbia Pictures until he resigned to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
After he left MGM, Wanger formed his own independent production company, in which he produced films for Paramount and United Artists (UA). Meanwhile, he served twice as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1939–1945, with a brief interruption). In recognition of his service, he received an Academy Honorary Award in 1946.
In 1940, Wanger married actress Joan Bennett. In December 1951, believing she was having an affair with her talent agent Jennings Lang, Wanger confronted and shot Lang, who survived. Wanger pleaded guilty to assault and served three months in prison. The experience inspired him to produce the prison film Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). Wanger later produced Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Want to Live! (1958), which won Susan Hayward an Academy Award for Best Actress.
In 1958, Wanger signed with Twentieth Century-Fox to produce Cleopatra (1963). The production endured numerous difficulties, including a heavily publicized extramarital affair between the film's stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Although the film eventually became a commercial success, Cleopatra effectively ended Wanger's producing career. He died of a heart attack in New York City on November 18, 1968, aged 74.
Early life Wanger was born Walter Feuchtwanger in San Francisco. He was the son of Stella (Stettheimer) and Sigmund Feuchtwanger, who were from German Jewish families that had emigrated to the United States in the 19th century. Wanger was from a non-observant Jewish family, and later attended Episcopalian services with his wife. In order to assimilate into American society, his mother altered the family name to Wanger in 1908. The Wangers were well-connected and upper middle class, something which later differentiated Wanger from the other Jewish film moguls who came from lower class, mercantile backgrounds.
In 1905, when Wanger was eleven, his father died and his mother subsequently moved the family across the country to New York. In New York, he attended Cascadilla Preparatory School (now called Cascadilla School) in Ithaca. Wanger later studied at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was a founding member of the Dartmouth Laboratory Theatre. After leaving college, Wanger became a professional theatrical producer in New York City where he worked with figures such as the influential British manager Harley Granville-Barker and the Russian actress Alla Nazimova.
Following the American entry into World War I in 1917, Wanger served with the U.S. Army in Italy initially in the Signal Corps where he worked as a pilot on reconnaissance missions, and later in propaganda operations directed at the Italian public. It was during this period that Wanger first came into contact with filmmaking. In April 1918 Wanger was transferred to the Committee on Public Information, and joined an effort to combat anti-war or pro-German sentiment in Allied Italy. This was partly accomplished through a series of short propaganda films screened in Italian cinemas promoting democracy and Allied war aims.
After the Allied victory, Wanger returned to the United States in 1919 and was discharged from the army. Wanger married silent film actress Justine Johnstone in 1919. He initially returned to theatre production, before a chance meeting with film producer Jesse Lasky drew him into the world of commercial filmmaking. Lasky was impressed with Wanger's ideas and his experiences in the theatre, and hired him to head a New York office vetting and acquiring books and plays for use as film stories for Famous Players–Lasky (later to become Paramount), which was then the largest film production company in the world.
Career 1921–1931: Paramount Wanger's job at Famous Players–Lasky was to meet the studio's large annual requirement for fresh stories. One of Wanger's major successes in his early years was his selection to adapt The Sheik into a feature film. In 1921, it became an extremely successful film starring Rudolph Valentino. The film helped establish the popularity of the Orientalist genre, which Wanger returned to a number of times during his career.
By 1921, Wanger was unhappy with the salary terms he was receiving and left his job with Paramount. He travelled to Britain where he worked as a prominent cinema and theatre manager until 1924. While on a visit to London, Jesse Lasky offered to appoint him as "general manager of production" on improved terms and Wanger accepted.
Wanger's second spell with Paramount lasted from 1924 to 1931, during which time his annual wage rose from $150,000 to $250,000. He was tasked with overseeing the work of the studio heads, which meant he had little involvement with the production of individual films. Because he was based in New York, Wanger worked more closely with the company's Astoria Studios in Queens. A rivalry developed between Wanger-influenced Astoria productions and those of B. P. Schulberg, who ran the Paramount productions in Hollywood. From the mid-1920s, the company was rapidly overtaken by the recently formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) as the industry's leading company. Along with the heavy financial losses incurred on big-budget films, Paramount shut down the Astoria Studios and shifted all production to Hollywood. Wanger opposed this move and felt he was being squeezed out of the company.
In 1926, Warner Bros. premiered Don Juan, a film with music and sound effects. During an intermission for Don Juan, Wanger raced into the lobby, called Lasky in California and exclaimed, "Jesse, this is a revolution!" The following year, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer with partial synchronized dialogue and singing scenes. In April 1928, Adolph Zukor called Paramount's studio executives into a meeting and demanded to know why they hadn't produced a sound film. Along with other film studios, Paramount initially resisted adopting sound films and continued to exclusively produce silent ones. Wanger convinced his colleagues of the importance of sound and synchronized a completed 1928 silent baseball film Warming Up to sound.
After being closed for a year, the Astoria Studios were re-opened in 1929 to make sound films, taking advantage of their close proximity to Broadway where many actors were recruited to appear in early talkies. Wanger recruited several performers including Maurice Chevalier, the Marx Brothers, Claudette Colbert, Jeanette MacDonald, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins; directors such as George Cukor and Rouben Mamoulian; and playwrights Noël Coward, Preston Sturges, and Donald Ogden Stewart. Wanger's New York films were often adapted from stage plays and focused on sophisticated comedies, often with European settings, while Schulberg concentrated on more populist stories in Hollywood.
By 1930, Wanger's division expanded its production output to 30 films per year. Among those films were the fallen woman genre. Wanger produced Tarnished Lady (1931), which starred Tallulah Bankhead and was George Cukor's directorial debut. While these films were popular in New York, they were not as successful among regional audiences. When the Great Depression hit the film industry in the early 1930s, the Astoria Studios increasingly struggled to produce box office hits, and in December 1931 it was closed down again. Wanger was later informed that his contract would not be renewed and he left Paramount.
1931–1932: Columbia After he left Paramount, Wanger attempted to become an independent film producer but was unable to secure financing. In December 1931, Wanger joined Columbia Pictures when Harry Cohn, the studio's co-founder, had wanted to improve his studio's prestige from its Poverty Row past by producing special, large-budget productions each year to complement the bulk of the studio's low-budget films.
Hired as a vice president, Wanger worked in Columbia's New York story department, where he searched through literary material to adapt into films. At Wanger's insistence, they interviewed and hired inexperienced writers, one of which was Dore Schary. Within three months, he signed playwrights S. N. Behrman and Preston Sturges, and actors Bryan Foy, Bert Wheeler, and Robert Woolsey to Columbia. Also, he instituted a profit-sharing system to reduce production costs and sign non-contracted talents to Columbia.
In April 1932, Cohn asked Wanger to move to Hollywood as a production supervisor. There, Wanger acquired the screen rights to Grace Zaring Stone's 1930 novel The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Herbert Brenon was hired to direct the adaptation, but he quit Columbia because of the profit-sharing contract. Frank Capra took over as director, so Wanger consented provided he received screen credit as the producer. Released in January 1933, the film lost money because it was banned in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth due to its racial subject matter.
Inspired by the politically themed films, Wanger turned his attention to producing a political drama. Adapted from the novel Robert Sharon Allen and Drew Pearson, Wanger produced Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932). The film depicts Button Gwinnett Brown, a young congressman, whose campaign was supported by Prohibition bootleggers, who arrives to rid Washington, D.C. of corruption while he courts Alice Wylie, a senator's daughter. Released one month before the 1932 presidential election, the film earned favorable reviews from critics. Prior to the film's success, in August 1932, Wanger's contract with Columbia was renewed. Shortly after, Jack Cohn blocked his brother Harry's nomination of Wanger to Columbia's board of directors. Columbia later closed the New York story department, and Wanger decided to leave.
1933–1934: MGM In December 1932, Wanger turned down an invitation from David O. Selznick to join RKO Radio Pictures. Instead, he accepted Irving Thalberg's offer to join MGM. In January 1933, Wanger was open to producing another political melodrama. He asked MGM's story editor Samuel Marx to purchase the film rights to the novel Gabriel Over the White House by Thomas F. Tweed. The film starred Walter Huston as U.S. President Judson "Judd" Hammond, who has a near-fatal automobile accident and becomes a benevolent dictator under the divine influence of the archangel Gabriel. Eventually, he resolves the nation's crises and achieves world peace before he dies. Wanger decided not to receive screen credit, following Thalberg's mantra: "Credit you give yourself is not worth having."