Walter Mirisch, Oscar-winning producer, dead at 101
nypost.comAs a producer, Mirisch aggressively recruited top filmmakers such as Billy Wilder and Norman Jewison, then gave them freedom to craft the movies as they saw fit.“We offered these filmmakers what they needed,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1983. “Billy could call me up and say, `I’d next like to do a picture about so-and-so’ — and that’s all we’d need to know. … We became, in effect, partners with our directors.”His company’s regular stable of directors included not only Wilder and Jewison, but Blake Edwards and John Sturges.
The company also produced movies by John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, George Roy Hill and Hal Ashby.Mirisch entered the movie business in his teens, advancing from usher to management jobs with a theater chain before going on to production work on low-budget action flicks and Westerns in the late 1940s.The company he founded in 1957 with his brother Marvin and half brother Harold was one of the most successful independent production outfits to arise from the old studio system as television cut into movie attendance.The Mirischs made a string of hits from the 1950s to the 1970s, among them “The Magnificent Seven,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Great Escape,” “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “The Pink Panther” and its sequel, “A Shot in the Dark.”Their company started with a handful of Westerns before producing 1959′s “Some Like It Hot,” the Wilder comedy with Marilyn Monroe co-starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as cross-dressing musicians running from the mob.Mirisch was willing to take on unusual projects.
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