WALTER WANGER - AUTOGRAPHED SIGNED PHOTOGRAPH - HFSID 278445

WALTER WANGER
Signed sepia-toned bust photo of Wanger in suit-and-tie
Photographsigned "Walter Wanger". With pencil notations in unknown hand and ink stamp fromThe Cinema Bookstore in London, England on verso. B/w sepia-toned, 7½x10¾ overall, 7½x9¾ image, one surface. Wanger (1894-1968, born Walter Feuchtwanger in San Francisco, California) was an Academy Award-nominated American film producer. His long, colorful career is one of Hollywood's greatest untold stories. An intellectual and a socially conscious movie executive who produced provocative message movies and glittering romantic melodramas, Wanger's career started at Paramount studios in the 1920s and led him to work at virtually every major studio as either a contract producer or an independent. Wagner worked on many films - including The Sheik (1921), which made Rudolph Valentino a star - before producing his first picture, film The Cocoanuts (1929), which was the Marx Brothers' first film. His many significant productions include Gabriel Over the White House (1933), Queen Christina (1933), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), Stagecoach (1939), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Scarlet Street (1945), Joan of Arc (1948), The Reckless Moment (1949), the science-fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), I Want to Live! (1958), and his final film, the monumental epic Cleopatra (1963), for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. In 1951, Wanger shot at his third wife Jennings Lang after believing him to be having an affair with Bennett and Lang. Wanger's attorney, Jerry Giesler, mounted a "temporary insanity" defense and Wanger served a four-month sentence at the Castaic Honor Farm two hours' drive north of Los Angeles. The experience profoundly affected him and in 1954 he made the prison film Riot in Cell Block 11, directed by Body Snatchers director Don Siegel. He was given an Honorary Academy Award in 1946 for his service as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He refused another honorary Oscar in 1949 for Joan of Arc, out of anger over the fact that the film, which he felt was one of his best, had not been nominated for Best Picture. Ink stamp and pencil notes (unknown hand) on verso. Lightly toned, silvered, creased and bowed, otherwise in fine condition.