In Remembrance: Ingo Preminger

     Ingo Preminger, the literary agent turned film producer, has passed away on June 7, 2006 in Pacific Palisades, CA. He was 95.

     Born on February 25, 1911 in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary in what is now the Ukraine, Preminger was the brother of noted film director Otto Preminger. Raised in Vienna, Preminger earned a law degree from the University of Vienna, but fled Europe in 1938 in response to the rise of Nazism. Settling in New York City, he owned a paint supply business.

     In 1947, Preminger moved to Los Angeles to work at the Nat Goldstein talent agency. The following year Preminger opened his own firm to represent screenwriters, directors, composers, film editors and actors. Preminger worked with several writers who had been blacklisted during the 1950s Red Scare, including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr. Preminger used fronts, other writers who would claim a blacklisted writer’s work as their own, to circumvent the studio’s reluctance to employ them. In 1961, Preminger sold the agency to General Artists Corp., but stayed on as the head of the literary department.

     Preminger made the transition to film production in 1966. Preminger was sent a copy of the book MASH, written by New Jersey doctor Richard Hornberger under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, by his client Lardner. Preminger took the book to 20^th Century Fox production head Richard Zanuck with the stipulation that if Zanuck wanted to make a film from the book, Preminger would get to produce the film. Zanuck agreed to the deal the following day. In return for having sent him the book, Preminger hired Lardner to write the screenplay. Although made for a relatively small budget by director Robert Altman, M*A*S*H (1970) would become both a critical and box office success.

     Preminger would only produce one other film, the 1972 spy thriller The Salzburg Connection.