Sol Lesser

Sol Lesser was raised in the movie business from childhood, helping in his father's San Francisco nickelodeon before he was out of short pants. He built his early fortune not in production but in exhibition and distribution, assembling theater holdings that fed into the West Coast Theatres circuit, and he understood the picture trade from the box office backward, a merchant's grasp of what audiences would pay to see.

Moving into production, Lesser specialized in reliable popular entertainment rather than prestige. He produced vehicles for the child star Jackie Coogan and a stream of Westerns and family pictures, operating as a canny independent who supplied the majors, including RKO, with dependable product. His most enduring franchise was Tarzan. Taking over the ape-man from other hands, Lesser produced a long run of Tarzan adventures through the 1940s and 1950s, keeping Johnny Weissmuller swinging on the vines and then continuing the series with Lex Barker and Gordon Scott, sustaining one of Hollywood's most durable characters across a generation.

Lesser also has a strange and honorable footnote in film history. When the Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein's ambitious Mexican project collapsed unfinished, its financing exhausted, Lesser acquired the orphaned footage and assembled portions of it into the release "Thunder Over Mexico," a controversial act that at least rescued some of Eisenstein's images from oblivion. During the Second World War he produced the star-studded morale booster "Stage Door Canteen," a tribute to the servicemen's hospitality centers.

A founding member of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers, Lesser was a respected elder of the trade who represented the independents' interests in an industry dominated by the majors. The Academy recognized his long and constructive service with an honorary Oscar in 1961. He lived on until 1980, a shrewd, unpretentious craftsman of popular cinema who proved an independent could endure the whole studio era and outlast it.