Samuel Bronston
Country:
USA
Company:
Entertainment
Bronson produced two films for Columbia Pictures The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942) and City Without Men (1943).
His first film for his new production company, Samuel Bronston Productions,
was Jack London, (1943) for United Artists followed by City Without Men (1943). He
was to produce A Walk in the Sun, but when United Artists ceased funding of the film
so as not to compete with The Story of G.I. Joe, the property was taken over by Lewis
Milestone with the film released by 20th Century Fox. Bronston later successfully won
a settlement for a percentage of rights to the film. He was a pioneer in the practice of locating epic-scale productions in Spain to reduce the massive costs involved and
using frozen funds. He had success with his series of epic films: John Paul Jones (1959), King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), 5 Days at Peking (1963) and The Fal of the Roman Empire (1964). In 1962, he was awarded a Special Merit Golden Globe Award
for El Cid that inspired him to help build gigantic studios in Las Rozas near Madrid. Bronston frequently worked with a regular team of creative artists: the direc-
tor Anthony Mann, the screenwriters Philip Yordan and Jesse Lasky Jr., composers Dimitri Tiomkin and Miklós Rózsa, the co-producers Jaime Prades, Alan Brown
and Michal Waszynski, the cinematographer Robert Krasker and film editor Robert Lawrence. He also favoured Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren as his leading actors.