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1-3 of 3
- Producer
- Production Manager
- Director
The son of an out-of-work bookkeeper, Pasternak arrived in the U.S. from Hungary in 1921. After working in a belt factory in Philadelphia, he moved to New York where he plucked chickens and worked in a cafeteria. Becoming increasingly infatuated with the film business, it didn't take him long to find a job at the Long Island Paramount studio as a busboy and washing dishes in the commissary for 15 $ a week. His easy manner earned him the sobriquet 'Smiling Joe' and he was invited to do a screen test, which went rather badly. As acting seemed out of the question, one of Paramount's directors took pity on the young man and gave him a tryout as fourth assistant. By 1923, Joe had advanced to second assistant and was regularly associated with the films of his protégé, Allan Dwan. When Paramount closed their Long Island facility, Joe made the trip to Hollywood, but found work scarce. However, his effort as director of a low budget two-reel comedy was noticed by the director Wesley Ruggles, who promptly engaged him as his assistant at Universal studios. In 1926, he was packed off to Europe to act as talent scout and, after another two years, was offered the position of manager of their European operation, Deutsche Universal-Film AG, based in Berlin.
From 1929, Joe also worked as producer of a string of German, Austrian and Hungarian light entertainments, a mixture of musicals, comedies and romances. In 1935, Universal, in dire financial straits, wound down their European unit and a new management recalled Joe to Hollywood. Within a year, he managed to almost single-handedly save the studio from bankruptcy through his canny promotion of charismatic teenage singing sensation Deanna Durbin (a recent acquisition from MGM) to star status. At the same time, he imported several fellow Hungarian émigrés into Hollywood, notably his close friend, the talented director Henry Koster, and his brother-in-law, the character actor S.Z. Sakall, who was to become fondly known as 'Cuddles'. Assigning direction to Koster, Joe produced the hugely successful box office hit Three Smart Girls (1936), followed by nine more musical outings in a similar vein, which brought fame and fortune to both Deanna and Joe, and put Universal financially in the pink. Joe stuck to the same formula (wholesome , Cinderella-type stories with polished musical interludes) on every occasion, using a tried-and-tested crew of writers and directors - all musical comedy experts - including Koster, Norman Krasna, Edward Ludwig and Norman Taurog. After launching the career of another talented juvenile soprano named Gloria Jean, Joe proceeded to revive the flagging fortunes of former Paramount star Marlene Dietrich, remodelling her image into one that was more approachable to a general audience. He effectively recast her original 'Blue Angel' bar room singer as wisecracking, good-hearted saloon girl Frenchy in Destry Rides Again (1939), a gently self-mocking western, which turned out to be one of the biggest hits for Universal in 1939.
In 1941, now firmly ensconced in Hollywood as the 'king of musicals', Joe made the natural progression by joining MGM, the organisation most adept at this particular genre. While Arthur Freed headed the A-team, Joe was assigned the second string production unit at MGM, which handled operettas and light musical entertainments. During his tenure, Joe became protégé to Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell and helped to make swimming talent Esther Williams into a bankable movie star. He had huge successes with operatic films, like Mario Lanza's The Great Caruso (1951) and The Merry Widow (1952). He also handled some lavish, big budget extravaganzas, including Thousands Cheer (1943), Anchors Aweigh (1945) and the compelling, though fictionalised, story of Ruth Etting, Love Me or Leave Me (1955). Joe rounded off his career with a trio of Elvis Presley musicals and produced the 1966 Academy Award ceremonies (the first to be filmed in colour), at which one of the most honoured films was the David Lean-directed epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) - which just happened to have been authored by Joe's distant relative Boris Pasternak. Joe retired in 1968 with an impressive one hundred production credits to his name, and died in Hollywood in September 1991 at the age of 89.- Miklós Nyiszli was born on 17 June 1901 in Szilágysomlyó (Simleu Silvaniei) in Transylvania, at the time in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He studied medicine, first in Cluj in 1920, then in Kiel between 1921 and 1924. In 1926 he enrolled at the medical faculty of the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University in Breslau, completing his degree in 1929. In Germany, Nyiszli specialised in forensic pathology; his doctoral dissertation dealt with indications of causes of death in suicides. He studied and worked under the supervision of Karl Reuter, the director of the Breslau Institute of Forensic Medicine, and Georg Strassmann, pathologist and professor of forensic medicine at the University of Breslau. In 1930, Nyiszli returned to Transylvania and began practicing in the town of Oradea. He soon established himself as a forensic pathologist, often assisting the police and the courts in identifying unusual or disputed causes of death. In 1937, he moved with his wife and daughter to Maramures in northern Transylvania, to the small town of Viseul de Sus, where he opened a private practice. Following the Vienna Award of August 1940, Northern Transylvania was returned to Hungary. In 1942, Nyiszli was sent to the work camp in the village of Desze (Desesti), also in Maramures, from where in May 1944 he and his family were deported to Germany. First he worked on the construction site of the artificial rubber factory being built by IG Farben in nearby Monowitz (Auschwitz III); in June 1944 the Nyiszli family was transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. In Auschwitz he was tattooed with his camp number: A 8450. His studies at a prestigious German university with respected specialists impressed SS medical officer Dr. Josef Mengele, who was looking for an assistant. He became a Jewish inmate doctor and forensic pathologist who worked particularly for Mengele in the crematorium II in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He remained there until January 1945. After Auschwitz, came Mauthausen, Melk and Ebensee in Upper Austria. In July 1945, upon his return to Transylvania, he offered his deposition before the Budapest Commission for the Welfare of Deported Hungarian Jews. Nyiszli's wife and daughter survived as well. The family settled again in Oradea, now Romania, where Nyiszli opened a private practice in 1946. Nyiszli finished writing his memoirs, which he published in 1946, in a serialised form in the Hungarian newspaper "Világ" ("The World"), and in March 1946 as a book under the title "Dr Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az Auschwitz-i [sic] krematóriumban" ("I was Dr Mengele's autopsy doctor at the Auschwitz crematorium"). Nyiszli's memoirs were at that time the first publication on the unknown subject of the 'Sonderkommandos' and it became an important document for historical research on Auschwitz, still highly recommended today by expert Dr. Gideon Greif. As an important witness Nyiszli travelled to the Nuremberg Trials and offered on 8 September 1947 his deposition to one of the interrogators in the Medical Trials, Benvenuto von Halle. By 1948, he could no longer practice as a private doctor. His daughter Susanna married in 1952 and had a daughter, Monica. Miklós Nyiszli died of a heart attack on 5 May 1956 in Oradea, Romania.
- Terka Lux was born in 1873 in Szilágysomlyó, Austria-Hungary. Terka was a writer, known for Az isten fia és az ördög fia (1918). Terka died on 9 May 1938 in Budapest, Hungary.