Wallis, Hal B

▪ American film producer

born Sept. 14, 1899, Chicago

died Oct. 5, 1986, Rancho Mirage, Calif.

      American motion-picture producer, associated with more than 400 feature-length films from the late 1920s to the mid-1970s.

      Wallis began work at age 14 as an office boy and later worked as a traveling salesman. In 1922 his family moved to Los Angeles, where he managed a movie theatre before joining the publicity staff of Warner Brothers in 1923. He soon headed publicity there and by 1928 was chief of production, a job temporarily taken over by Darryl F. Zanuck in 1931. Under Zanuck he produced Little Caesar (1930), which spawned a generation of Warner-produced (Warner Brothers) gangster films, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), and Gold Diggers of 1933. In 1933 Wallis succeeded Zanuck as executive producer in charge of production at Warner Brothers, and in the following decade he produced some of the most popular films in the history of Hollywood, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Captain Blood (both 1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dark Victory (1939), The Letter and The Sea Hawk (both 1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Sergeant York (1941), and Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy (both 1942). Besides handling the finance and budgeting of motion pictures, Wallis displayed a knack for choosing the director and the actors who could most effectively exploit a given screenplay. He “discovered” the actors Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and he significantly aided the careers of Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

      From 1944 Wallis worked as an independent producer, making movies for Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Universal Pictures. In this capacity he produced Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), The Rose Tattoo (1955), and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and the lavish historical dramas Becket (1964), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), and Mary Queen of Scots (1971). He also turned out purely commercial films starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Elvis Presley. The last film that he produced was the comic western Rooster Cogburn in 1975. The motion pictures Wallis produced or oversaw received a total of 32 Oscars and 121 Academy Award nominations. Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal B. Wallis, written with Charles Higham, was published in 1980.

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