Universal Terrors, 1951–1955 by Tom Weaver & David Schecter & Robert J. Kiss

Author:Tom Weaver & David Schecter & Robert J. Kiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2017-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Newman, who recently ankled 20th-Fox pact to go into indie production, has already assigned George Callahan to write the screenplay.

About a month later, when the industry again read of This Island Earth, the name of another Hollywood mover-and-shaker, much better-known than Newman, was part of the story.

Victor Orsatti (1905–1984) was the seventh and last child of Italian immigrants Morris and Mary Manze Orsatti, the former a bank vice-president and owner of the International Steamship and Railroad Agency.5 In 1930, their son Frank, a former bootlegger, went into the agency business and brought in his brothers Al, Victor and Ernie. The Orsatti Agency represented actors, executives, producers, directors, writers and radio talent. By 1949 Frank and Al were dead of heart attacks (at 53 and 48, respectively) and Victor took charge. Tim Adler’s book Hollywood and the Mob calls Victor “a gangster-cum-agent” which certainly has the ring of truth when you know about brother Frank’s brushes with the law and their father’s ties to organized crime; Dad spent time up the river in the 1920s.

On September 17, 1953, Orsatti went over to the moviemaking side of the biz, forming Sabre Productions and making Newman his vice-president and executive producer. The plan was to put out three features annually, two of them to be directed by Newman. Sabre’s kickoff flick, according to Variety, would be the color-widescreen-stereophonic sound This Island Earth, scheduled to start in mid–November. In the Variety article, Orsatti claimed that financing for This Island Earth and their second film Teheran, an adventure drama with an Iran setting, “has already been completed and production will get underway as soon as cast is selected and shooting space secured.”6 Hedda Hopper told readers of her “In Hollywood” column (September 18) that cast-wise, Orsatti and Newman were “aiming high for the stars”: “For Earth, the boys will try to get Richard Widmark, who wants a rest from Hollywood.” (When Robert Skotak came across this Hopper column, he asked Newman about it, and the director said that Widmark was never under consideration. Perhaps Widmark was one of Hopper’s pet favorites and she interjected his name into her column whenever the fancy struck her, truthfulness be damned.)

Scripter George Callahan, mentioned above, receives on-screen credit as Edward G. O’Callaghan on This Island Earth as well as on Flight to Hong Kong (1956), the latter a Sabre Production directed by Newman. He’d done a lot of writing for Monogram in the 1940s, penning entries in that Poverty Row studio’s Charlie Chan and Shadow series; in the ’50s he mostly worked in TV, including Orsatti’s Western TV series The Texan. He and Newman co-wrote the This Island Earth screenplay according to a November 1953 column by Philip K. Scheuer, a statement not borne out by the on-screen credits (only O’Callaghan is listed). But Newman told Fantastic Films interviewer Al Taylor that he did have a hand in the writing: He said that he felt that the Jones novel “had the makings of a very exciting science fiction film [and] worked out a screen treatment,” then hired Callahan to write the shooting script.

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