Centron Films
Harvey broke into the film business as an actor in some of the movies being made by Centron Corporation of Lawrence, an independent industrial and educational film production company. Founded in 1947 in Lawrence by Arthur H. Wolf and Russell A. Mosser, Centron would come to the forefront of the industrial and educational film companies in the United States. Harvey joined the staff in 1952 and went on to work for Centron as a film director, writer, and producer for 33 years, making a variety of short industrial, educational, documentary, and government films. Centron competed with large companies on both coasts to become one of the top producers of industrial and educational films. Harvey was known for his high quality films, coming in on time and under budget. Harvey and his film crews were dispatched to locations around the globe to bring back images for geography and travel films. Harvey also worked with many well-known professional actors and entertainers in Centron films, such as Walter Pidgeon, Rowan and Martin, Dennis Day, Louis Nye, George Gobel, Anita Bryant, Eddie Albert, Ed Ames, Jesse White, and Ricardo Montalban. The director won many national and international awards for his work, including the highest honors from the American Film Festival, C.I.N.E., and the Columbus Film Festival, and claimed an Oscar nomination for the documentary Leo Beuerman. In 1981, Wolf and Mosser sold Centron to the Coronet division of Esquire, Inc. Harvey retired from Centron four years later, in 1985.
Harvey and his first wife Bea were divorced around 1960, and shortly afterward Harvey met Pauline G. Pappas, who was one of the investors for Carnival of Souls. The two were married by the end of the 1960s.
When a crew from ABC came to Lawrence in 1982 to shoot the controversial television movie on nuclear war, The Day After, they cast Harvey as a Midwestern farmer struggling to rejuvenate his crops after the nuclear attack. The film was broadcast to much international publicity and controversy in 1983.
After his retirement in 1985, Harvey continued in various activities, teaching film production at the University of Kansas, adjudicating films for the American Film Festival and the Kansas Film and Video Festival, and directing and acting in plays for the Lawrence Community Theater. He also had small speaking roles in the made-for-TV movies Murderer Ordained and Where Pigeons Go to Die, both of which were filmed on location in Kansas.
Read more about this topic: Herk Harvey
Famous quotes containing the word films:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)