Arnold Laven (February 3, 1922 – September 13, 2009) was an American film and television director and producer. He was one of the founders and principals of the American film and television production company Levy-Gardner-Laven. Laven was a producer of, among other things, the western television series The Rifleman and The Big Valley. He also directed motion pictures, including Without Warning!, The Rack, The Monster That Challenged the World, Geronimo, Rough Night in Jericho, and Sam Whiskey. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Laven directed dozens of episodes of television series, including episodes of Mannix, The A-Team, Hill Street Blues, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantasy Island, The Rockford Files and CHiPs.
Early years
Laven was born in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to Los Angeles with his family in the late 1930s. He got his start in the entertainment business working as a mail room messenger at Warner Bros.
First Motion Picture Unit
During World War II, Laven was assigned to the U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, the first unit of the United States military to be made up entirely of motion picture personnel. The unit made training films from 1942–1945 at the old Hal Roach motion picture lot. Laven later recalled that the films they made were not "phony" Hollywood war films: "They had to be approved by the higher-ups in the Air Force. They had to be technically accurate in every possible way." The unit included actors George Montgomery, Arthur Kennedy, Alan Ladd, William Holden, and DeForest Kelley. Army Capt. Ronald Reagan was the unit's personnel officer. Laven recalled that the men liked and respected Reagan, noting, "He was always a very warm, cordial, and pleasant man."
Laven described the First Motion Picture Unit as "the best film school in the world," because participants learned all aspects of the movie industry. He even had the opportunity to work briefly in front of the camera as an extra in the pilot training short, Live and Learn.
Post-war years
After the war, Laven continued to work in the motion picture business, holding jobs as a script supervisor, dialogue director, and film press agent. He worked on such films as William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives and Fred Zinnemann's Teresa.
1950s
In September 1951, Laven formed a production company with Jules V. Levy and Arthur Gardner, both of whom he had met while working in the First Motion Picture Unit. The company, which eventually became Levy-Gardner-Laven, was initially called "Allart Pictures, Inc." The company opened offices at Goldwyn studios and announced plans to begin casting on their first feature, Without Warning!, a thriller about a psychopathic killer on the loose. Laven directed, and Adam Williams was cast as a gardener who murdered women with his garden shears. Operating on a shoe-string budget, the film was shot on the streets of Los Angeles—on the Hollywood Freeway, in Chavez Ravine, at the Produce Terminal, and plant nurseries, cocktail bars, and taxi offices. On seeing the end product, the Los Angeles Times reported that Laven and his partners had "succeeded in parlaying a $15,000 investment into a film production that is likely to gross well over $1,000,000, so decisive is its merit."
In May 1952, Hedda Hopper announced the arrival of the new team as follows:
The trio's second feature was Vice Squad, a 1953 detective drama directed by Laven and starring Edward G. Robinson and Adam Williams.
The third feature, Down Three Dark Streets, was another semidocumentary-style film noir starring Broderick Crawford as an FBI agent. The film's climax took place around the Hollywood Sign. A newspaper review of the 1954 film noted the promise of the three young producers:
In 1956, Laven went out on his own to direct The Rack, a drama starring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin about a soldier who is court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy after spending two years in a North Korean prison camp. The film was based on a United States Steel Hour program written by Rod Serling.
In 1957, Levy-Gardner-Laven team turned their focus to the popular science fiction and monster genres. Laven received directing and producing credits on The Monster That Challenged the World, a feature about an army of giant mollusks that emerge from the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley. A review in the Los Angeles Times called the film "distinctly chilling," noted that "Laven never lets the tension slacken," and described the plot as follows: