Pandro S. Berman

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Pandro Berman was born in Pittsburgh in 1905. His father Henry Berman was general manager of Universal Pictures during Hollywood's formative years. Pandro was an assistant director during the 1920s under Mal St. Clair and Ralph Ince. In 1930, he was hired as a film editor at RKO Radio Pictures, then became an assistant producer. When RKO supervising producer William LeBaron walked out during production of the ill-fated The Gay Diplomat (1931), Berman took over his responsibilities, remaining in the post until 1939. The Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals were in production during the Berman regime, Katharine Hepburn rose to prominence, and such RKO classics as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Gunga Din (both 1939) were completed.  Berman left for MGM in 1940, where he oversaw such productions as Ziegfeld Girl (1941), National Velvet (1944), The Bribe (1949), Father of the Bride(1950), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and BUtterfield 8 (1960). He survived several executive shake-ups at MGM and remained there until 1963, then went into independent production, closing out his career with the unsuccessful Move (1970). Berman was the winner of the 1976 Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. He died of congestive heart failure on July 13, 1996 in his Beverly Hills home, aged 91. Six of his films were nominated for Academy Award for Best Picture: The Gay Divorcee (1934), Alice Adams and Top Hat (both 1935), Stage Door (1937), Father of the Bride (1950), and Ivanhoe (1952). Text from Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License