Search results
Jack Dietz (1901 – 30 January 1969) was an American film producer, notable for his collaboration with Sam Katzman at Monogram Studios. At one stage he operated The Cotton Club in Harlem. In the late 1930s he produced movies of heavyweight fights.
- The Movie Was Partly Based on A Ray Bradbury Story.
- Jack Dietz Thought About Casting A Live Reptile.
- The Beast Itself Went Through Several Different Designs.
- Stock Footage from She (1935) Was Used During The Avalanche Scene.
- The Crumbling Buildings Were Hard to Animate.
- The Leading Lady Was Related to One of Bradbury’s Associates.
- Ray Harryhausen Devised The Film’S Climax.
- The Original Score Was deleted.
- No Part of Any Ocean Is 20,000 Fathoms Deep in Real Life.
- The Director’s Kid Absolutely Hated The Ending.
It all started with a roar. One night, while he was living near Santa Monica Bay, legendary sci-fi author Ray Bradbury was awakened from his sleep by a blaring foghorn. Moved by the mournful bellow, he quickly got to work on a short story about a lovelorn sea monster. Called The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (later retitled The Foghorn), it was publish...
Coincidentally, the man who handled Beast’s creature effects had been close friends with Bradbury since their teen years. A stop-motion animator by trade, Ray Harryhausen spent most of his early career working on shorts and cartoons. His first taste of feature-length filmmaking came in 1949, when he joined forces with Willis O’Brien—the technical m...
“I had to create a mythical dinosaur,” Harryhausen recalled. In his early concept art, he fitted the reptile with pointy ears, a sharp beak, and webbed, human-like hands. Another design sported what Harryhausen described as “sort of a round head.” Unhappy with this particular noggin, he replaced it with a new skull modeled after that of a Tyrannosa...
The movie opens with an H-Bomb test conducted above the Arctic circle. This experiment has the unfortunate side effect of releasing the Rhedosaurus from a glacier in which it’s been entombed for millions of years. After the blast, the newly awakened beast manages to trigger an avalanche while wandering around in the snow. A few clips from this sequ...
Like its literary counterpart, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms features a lighthouse destruction scene, but Dietz’s movie later abandons its source material by having the monster terrorize New York City. Perhaps the highlight of that sequence comes when our Rhedosaurus plows straight through a tower in lower Manhattan. Both of these buildings were mi...
Paula Raymond stars as Lee Hunter, a paleontologist who falls in love with our main hero, nuclear physicist Tom Nesbitt (played by Paul Christian). Interestingly, Raymond was the niece of Farnsworth Wright. A significant figure in the history of modern science fiction and fantasy, he’s best remembered for having spent 15 years editing the popular s...
In the grand finale, the Rhedosaurus starts attacking a roller coaster on Coney Island. Armed with a special gun capable of firing dangerous radioactive isotopes, Professor Nesbitt ascends to the top of this ride. Accompanying him is a brave NYPD officer played by The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’s Lee van Cleef. Using their weapon, the duo slays th...
Warner Bros. bought Beast from Mutual for the competitive sum of $400,000. Before releasing it, though, the big studio decided to overhaul the film’s musical accompaniment. The original soundtrack was penned by veteran composer Michael Michelet, who used what Harryhausen described as “light classical music” throughout the movie. Feeling that this w...
The deepest locale on the surface of planet Earth is known as the Challenger Deep. Located inside the Pacific Mariana Trench, this spot sits an incredible 6033 fathoms (or 36,201 feet) beneath the waves. Incidentally, Harryhausen’s breakout movie was originally going to be called The Monster From Beneath the Sea, but when Warner Bros. purchased the...
Released on June 13, 1953, Beast grossed more than $5 million, enough to make it one of the year’s biggest hits. However, the surprise smash was not without its critics. One day, Lourie took his 6-year-old daughter to a matinee screening. To his shock, she broke down in tears after they left the theater. “You are bad, Daddy!” she sobbed. “You kille...
Budget. $200,000. Box office. $5 million [1] [2] The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a 1953 American science fiction action horror film directed by Eugène Lourié, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen. The film stars Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, and Kenneth Tobey. [3] The screenplay is based on Ray Bradbury 's 1951 short ...
Jul 6, 2023 · Jack Dietz, Hal E. Chester, and Bernie Burton (of Mutual Films of California) added a film to their slate called “The Monster from Beneath the Sea”. They then reached out to art director ...
Mini Bio. Jack Dietz was born on December 7, 1901 in Yekaterinoslav, Russia. He was a producer, known for Voodoo Man (1944), Three of a Kind (1944) and Follow the Leader (1944). He died on January 30, 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
- December 7, 1901
- January 30, 1969
73 minutes. Country. United States. Language. English. Models Inc. (released in UK as That Kind of Girl) is a 1952 American film noir crime film directed by Reginald Le Borg and starring Howard Duff, Coleen Gray and John Howard. The film's sets were designed by the art director Ernst Fegté .
Jan 26, 2010 · His luck changed when he heard about a film producer, Jack Dietz, who was casting about for ways to animate the title creature of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the first of what would prove to be a new cycle of monster-on-the-loose films. Selling Dietz on stop-motion, Harryhausen sweetened the pot with his own "Dynamation" process, in ...
