Director-Producer Arnold Laven Passes
Partner in prolific production company Levy-Gardner-Laven.
Arnold Laven, a director and producer of movies and television series who was a partner in the Levy-Gardner-Laven production team, died September 13, 2009, at Tarzana Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87.
During World War II, Laven — who got his start as an assistant to Jack Warner at Warner Bros. — served in the First Motion Picture Unit stationed at Fort (Hal) Roach (Studios) in Culver City making training films alongside the likes of Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable and William Holden.
There, he met Jules V. Levy and Arthur Gardner. After the war and stints as script supervisors and assistant directors, the three formed Levy-Gardner-Laven Productions in 1951. It would become one of the longest-running partnerships in Hollywood history.
Their first feature, which Laven directed, was the low-budget production Without Warning. Over the next three decades, Levy-Gardner-Laven produced four television series and more than 20 features.
Laven’s television directing credits included episodes of such popular shows as The Big Valley, The Rifleman, Mannix, Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Rockford Files, Fantasy Island, Eight Is Enough, ChiPs, Hill Street Blues and The A-Team.
He directed such films as Down Three Dark Streets, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, The Rack, Anna Lucasta, Geronimo and Sam Whiskey.
In 1957, Laven and his partners were developing a Western for Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater and collaborating with a new screenwriter, Sam Peckinpah. The series, about a settler particularly adept at shooting a rifle, needed something to separate it from the many Westerns then on the air and in development.
Laven looked to his own relationship with his son Larry and told Peckinpah to foster a father-son relationship. The show, The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford, became one of the most successful of the 1960s.
Levy-Gardner-Laven also produced TV shows The Detectives, starring Robert Taylor, and The Big Valley, with Barbara Stanwyck.
Laven recently helped with the launch of The Rifleman on Hulu.com to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary.
He is survived by his wife of more than 58 years, their son and daughter Barbara, and sister.