Industry | Film production |
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Founded | 1951 in Beverly Hills, California, U.S. |
Levy-Gardner-Laven Productions was an American film production company based in Beverly Hills, California. The principals, Jules V. Levy, Arthur Gardner, and Arnold Laven, met while serving in the Air Force's First Motion Picture Unit during World War II. [1] While serving, they decided to form their own production company after the war ended. The three men formed Levy-Gardner-Laven in 1951.
Levy-Gardner-Laven's first production was the 1952 low-budget crime thriller film Without Warning! . [2]
Laven produced both films and television shows, and he directed many popular American television shows, including episodes of The A-Team , CHiPs , Mannix , The Big Valley , The Greatest American Hero and Hill Street Blues . Gardner was an actor prior to World War II, but chose to produce after the company was formed. [3] Along with Levy, who was a script supervisor prior to the war, Gardner wrote the story for a 1982 movie called Safari 3000. Levy-Gardner-Laven also produced classic T.V. series for Four Star Productions such as The Rifleman , The Big Valley , and The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor , all for ABC. [4] [5]
Levy-Gardner-Laven maintains an office in Beverly Hills, but their last production credit was in 1982.
Irwin Lawrence "Paul" Mazursky was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. Known for his dramatic comedies that often dealt with modern social issues, he was nominated for five Academy Awards for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), An Unmarried Woman (1978), Harry and Tonto (1974), and Enemies, A Love Story (1989). He is also known for directing such films as Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Moon over Parador (1988), and Scenes from a Mall (1991).
John Ernest Crawford was an American actor and singer. He first performed before a national audience as a Mouseketeer. At age 12, Crawford rose to prominence playing Mark McCain in the series The Rifleman, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy Award at age 13.
The Rifleman is an American Western television series starring Chuck Connors as rancher Lucas McCain and Johnny Crawford as his son Mark McCain. It was set in the 1880s in the fictional town of North Fork, New Mexico Territory. The show was filmed in black and white, in half-hour episodes. The Rifleman aired on ABC from September 30, 1958, to April 8, 1963, as a production of Four Star Television. It was one of the first primetime series on US television to show a single parent raising a child.
Without Warning! is a 1952 American film noir crime film directed by Arnold Laven and starring Adam Williams, Meg Randall, and Ed Binns. The film is shot in a semidocumentary-style with police procedural voice-over narration in parts. Without Warning! was released commercially for the first time on DVD in 2005. Previously, the film was considered lost and unavailable for viewings.
Jerome Courtland was an American actor, director and producer. He acted in films in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and in television in the 1950s and 1960s. Courtland also appeared on Broadway in the musical Flahooley in the early 1950s. He directed and produced television series in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Sam Whiskey is a 1969 American Western comedy film shot in DeLuxe Color and directed by Arnold Laven, starring Burt Reynolds, Angie Dickinson, Clint Walker and Ossie Davis. "Way ahead of its time," said Reynolds of the film. "I was playing light comedy and nobody cared."
Four Star Television, also called Four Star International, was an American television production company. Founded in 1952 as Four Star Productions by prominent Hollywood actors Dick Powell, David Niven, Charles Boyer and Joel McCrea, it was inspired by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz founding Desilu Productions a year earlier. McCrea left soon after its founding to continue in films, television and radio, and was replaced by Ida Lupino as the fourth star—although Lupino did not own stock in the company.
Richard Norman Anderson was an American film and television actor. One of his best-known roles was his portrayal of Oscar Goldman, the boss of Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers in both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman television series between 1974 and 1978 and their subsequent television movies: The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987), Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1989) and Bionic Ever After? (1994).
Shawn Adam Levy is a Canadian filmmaker and actor. He is the founder of 21 Laps Entertainment. His work has spanned numerous genres, and his films as a director have grossed a collective $3.5 billion worldwide.
Arthur Gardner Rankin Jr. was an American director, producer and screenwriter, who mostly worked in animation. Co-creator of Rankin/Bass Productions with his friend Jules Bass, he created stop-motion and traditional animation features such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, and the 1977 cartoon special of The Hobbit. He is credited on over 1,000 television programs.
The Monster That Challenged the World is a 1957 black-and-white science-fiction monster film from Gramercy Pictures, produced by Arthur Gardner, Jules V. Levy, and Arnold Laven, and starring Tim Holt and Audrey Dalton. The film was distributed by United Artists as the top half of a double feature with The Vampire. The film concerns an army of giant molluscs that emerge from California's Salton Sea.
Arnold Laven was an American film and television director and producer. He was one of the founders and principals of the American film and television production company Levy-Gardner-Laven. Laven was a producer of, among other things, the western television series The Rifleman and The Big Valley. He also directed motion pictures, including Without Warning!, The Rack, The Monster That Challenged the World, Geronimo, Rough Night in Jericho, and Sam Whiskey. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Laven directed dozens of episodes of television series, including episodes of Mannix, The A-Team, Hill Street Blues, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantasy Island, The Rockford Files and CHiPs.
Arthur Gardner was an American actor and film producer. He was known for his television western, The Rifleman. He was a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Law of the Plainsman is a Western television series starring Michael Ansara that aired on NBC from October 1, 1959, until September 22, 1960.
The Detectives is an American crime drama series which ran on ABC during its first two seasons, and on NBC during its third and final season. The series, starring motion picture star Robert Taylor, was produced by Four Star Television in association with Levy-Gardner-Laven Productions.
The Glory Guys is a 1965 American Western Panavision film directed by Arnold Laven and written by Sam Peckinpah based on the 1956 novel The Dice of God by Hoffman Birney. Produced by Levy-Gardner-Laven and released by United Artists, the film stars Tom Tryon, Harve Presnell, Senta Berger, James Caan and Michael Anderson Jr.
Jules Victor Levy was an American television and film producer. Levy's television series include The Rifleman, The Detectives, and The Big Valley.
Geronimo is a 1962 American Western film made by Levy-Gardner-Laven and released by United Artists, starring Chuck Connors in the title role. The film was directed by Arnold Laven from a screenplay by Pat Fielder, filming took place in Sierra de Órganos National Park in the town of Sombrerete, Mexico.
Richard Devon was an American character actor and voice actor who between the late 1940s and 1991 performed in hundreds of roles on stage, radio, television, and in feature films.
Ernst Ragnar Rolf, better known as Tom Rolf, was a Swedish-born American film editor who worked on at least 48 feature films in a career spanning over fifty years. Most notable among these films are Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, for which he was nominated for the 1976 BAFTA Award for Best Editing, and Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, for which he and his editing team won the 1983 Oscar for Best Film Editing. Other notable films he edited include WarGames, Jacob's Ladder, Heat and The Horse Whisperer.