Albert Zugsmith
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Albert Zugsmith (April 24, 1910 – October 26, 1993) was an American film producer, film director and screenwriter who specialized in low-budget exploitation films through the 1950s and 1960s.
With a background in music promotion (Ted Weems, Paul Whitman) public relations (one of his clients in depression era Chicago was Al Capone), journalism and brokering communication properties (radio, newspaper, early television), Zugsmith became independently wealthy and began producing films at RKO during the Howard Hughes years. Zugsmith's most significant credits are a string of four genre masterpieces produced in the late 1950s, all for Universal Studios: the science-fiction classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, and the camp exploitation films produced for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer High School Confidential and The Girl in the Kremlin. An archive of some of his shooting scripts and screen plays are housed in the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa.
Partial filmography
- Invasion U.S.A. (1952)
- Paris Model (1953)
- Top Banana (1954)
- Female on the Beach (1955)
- Star in the Dust (1956)
- Written on the Wind (1956)
- The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
- The Girl in the Kremlin (1957)
- Touch of Evil (1958)
- The Tarnished Angels (1958)
- High School Confidential (1958)
- The Big Operator (1959)
- The Beat Generation (1959)
- Platinum High School (1960)
- College Confidential (1960)
- Sex Kittens Go to College (1960)
- The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960)
- Dondi (1961)
- Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
- Fanny Hill (1964)
- Psychedelic Sexualis (1966)
- The Phantom Gunslinger (1970)
