Biography for
Edgar G. Ulmer

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Date of Birth

17 September 1904, Olmütz, Moravia, Austria-Hungary [now Olomouc, Czech Republic]

Date of Death

30 September 1972, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA

Birth Name

Edgar George Ulmer

Spouse

Shirley Ulmer

(? - 30 September 1972) (his death)

Trivia

Father of Arianne Ulmer.

Historian/critic/director Peter Bogdanovich praises Ulmer's directorial work on low-budget movies like The Naked Dawn (1955) and Sette contro la morte (1964), which he considers "classics", adding that "the astonishing thing is that so many of Ulmer's movies have a clearly identifiable signature [despite being] accomplished with so little encouragement and so few means...". Ulmer worked in set design beginning as a teenager for Austrian director Max Reinhardt. He came with Reinhardt to the US in 1923 with the play "The Miracle", which opened on Broadway. He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios. He signed a long term contract there in October, 1943 after directing the "big budget" (by PRC standards anyway) Jive Junction (1943), becoming the outfit's #1 director. Today, Ulmer remains the principal reason PRC is mentioned in Hollywood history at all.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 1107-1112. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Many of his films involved pure geometric patterns.

Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, 'Don Siegel' , Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Despite being the resident "artist" at PRC, after signing his long term contract, the studio immediately assigned Ulmer to direct a series of short subjects produced by the R. Wolff Advertising Agency for Coca-Cola. The project took some 5 months and kept him busy while the studio was involved in a substantial upgrade resulting from it's purchase of various bankrupt properties along poverty row.

Ulmer's wife Shirley discusses the life and career she shared with him in an interview in Tom Weaver's book "I Was a Monster Movie Maker" (McFarland & Co., 2001). Their daughter Arianne shares her memories of Ulmer in Weaver's "Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks" (McFarland & Co., 1998).

Personal Quotes

I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had to do for money's sake.

[explaining how the studio ruined Annibale (1959)] My nicest scene, they cut out. I could not find any documentation or any explanation why Hannibal didn't take Rome after he defeated the Roman army at Cannae. Hannibal represented a dying civilization, the Carthaginians, and he was tremendously well-educated, knew that his civilization was moribund, was dying, and he also knew that the idea of democracy of the Roman republic was the coming thing, and couldn't get himself to destroy that - that was the future, and that's why Carthage did not let him come back. That's why he had to commit suicide five years later. The story actually should have been the tragedy of a man at that point in history when he sees his society dying and can see with his eyes what good will come - he cannot destroy it. But Warner Brothers threw it out - "much too philosophical". It was foolish.

[explaining why he refused offers to direct at the big Hollywood studios and instead stayed at lowly PRC] I didn't want to be ground up in the Hollywood hash machine.

Salary

The Strange Woman (1946)	$250/week
Thunder Over Texas (1934)	$300

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