Joseph E. Levine
Joseph Edward Levine (September 9, 1905 – July 31, 1987) was an American film distributor, financier, and producer. At the time of his death, it was said he was involved in one or another capacity with 497 films. Levine was responsible for the U.S. releases of Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, Attila and Hercules, which helped revolutionize U.S. film marketing, and was founder and president of Embassy Pictures. [1]
This article is about the film producer. For the philosopher, see Joseph Levine (philosopher).
Joseph E. Levine
July 31, 1987 (aged 81)
Producer, film distributor
1937–1987
2
Levine's biggest hit was director Mike Nichols' 1967 The Graduate, a blockbuster hit that was considered, then and now, a watershed film that inaugurated the New Hollywood and made Dustin Hoffman a superstar. At the time of its release, The Graduate became one of the Top Ten All-Time Box Office hits. With the great success of the film, Levine sold his company to the conglomerate Avco, though he continued on as the CEO of the renamed Avco-Embassy film production division.
Other films he produced and/or financed by Levine included Two Women, Contempt, The 10th Victim, Marriage Italian Style, The Lion in Winter, The Producers, Carnal Knowledge and The Night Porter. After leaving Avco-Embassy, he became an independent again, producing A Bridge Too Far.
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Levine was born in a slum in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 9, 1905. The youngest of six children of a Russian-Jewish[2] immigrant tailor, Joe did whatever work he could to help support his mother, a widow who had remarried only to have her second husband abandon her. This led Joe (in his later years) to tell an interviewer that he had known (in his words) "not one happy day" growing up. At 14 years of age he was hired for full-time work in a dress factory and left school, never to re-enroll.
In the 1920s, in partnership with two of his older brothers, Joe opened a basement dress shop, whose stock the Levine brothers obtained on consignment. He had multiple other jobs and operated the Cafe Wonderbar in Boston's Back Bay during this period and during the early and mid-1930s.[3]
Marriage and distribution career[edit]
In 1937, Levine encountered Rosalie Harrison, then a singer with Rudy Vallee's band, and left the restaurant business for her; within a week of their engagement, at Harrison's insistence, Levine sold the Cafe Wonderbar. They married the following year and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Joe bought, and commenced to run, a movie theater. Eventually, he became a successful, if small-time, distributor and exhibitor throughout New England, buying "decrepit" Westerns at low rates for his theaters, which eventually totalled seven, including three drive-ins.[4]
One of Levine's most unusual successes was Body Beautiful, a sex-hygiene film which he saw drawing a line of prospective ticket-buyers who were braving a snowstorm to that end. He later remembered buying it to show in his theaters because "it made me sick." He was also a representative for Burstyn-Mayer distributing Italian films such as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948).[4]
The Second World War led Levine to run an almost jingoistic promotion of the film Ravaged Earth, which had been shot in China. Renting the Shubert Theater in his native Boston, he spent large sums of his own money on advertisements for the film that he wrote himself; these reflected the anti-Japanese sentiments of the times and used language that would later be considered offensive. Nan Robertson's obituary of Levine quotes one of the slogans as reading: "Jap Rats Stop at Nothing – See This. It Will Make You Fighting Mad."
During the 1950s, he became an area sub-distributor for newly-formed American International Pictures.[4] In 1956, he bought the Australian film Walk Into Paradise, its low box-office revenues led him to change the title to Walk Into Hell, which gave it box-office success.[5] Levine discovered that double features with the same cast members or similar titles brought in higher box-office revenues; this led him to present two films together because they had similar titles.
In the 1960s he built two cinemas on 57th Street in New York City – the Lincoln Art Theatre and the Festival Theatre.[4]