Irving Lerner

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Irving Lerner
Born(1909-03-07)March 7, 1909
New York City, New York, United States
DiedDecember 25, 1976(1976-12-25) (aged 67)
Los Angeles, California, United States
OccupationFilm director
Known forblacklisted during the McCarthy period

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

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.[1]

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.[2]

In the winter of 1944, a counterintelligence officer caught Lerner attempting to photograph 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.[4] Lerner resigned and went to work with Joseph Strick for Keynote Records,[2] owned by Eric Bernay
, another Soviet intelligence contact. Arthur Adams, who ran Irving as an agent, also worked at Keynote.

Filmography

As Director

As Producer

As Editor

As Second Unit Director or Assistant Director

  • A Town Called Hell
     (1971, second unit director)
  • Custer of the West (1967, second unit director: Civil War sequence)
  • Spartacus (second unit director, uncredited)
  • Valley Town (1940, second unit director)
  • ...One Third of a Nation... (1939, second unit director, uncredited)

As Actor

As Miscellaneous Crew

Editing Department

Production Manager

As Cinematographer

Dedicatee

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive.
  2. ^
    ISBN 0300129874
    .
  3. ^ Miklitsch, Robert (2017). The Red and Black" American Film Noir in the 1950s. University of Illinois Press.
  4. ^ "University of California, Berkeley". Atomic Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  5. ISBN 978-1-4039-6144-0
    .

Bibliography

Further reading

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