Bernard Glasser

Bernard Glasser was born in Chicago just a little before the time that motion pictures were learning how to talk -- and from the time he was a toddler and was taken to his first movie, he was fascinated by films. According to an interview with scholar Tom Weaver, Glasser had always wanted to get involved in the picture business, but had to wait until after World War II to find a way in. Near the end of the 1940's, when he was in his twenties and teaching at Beverly Hills High School, not much more than a stone's throw from Hollywood, he finally took the gamble. He became employed as a production assistant, which led him to try his hand in the business end of the business. At the turn of the decade, he took a lease on an old, disused production facility, christened it Keywest Studios, and put it into operation, renting space to independent producers, who were starting to proliferate as the 1950's dawned. A lot of up-and-coming filmmakers and would-be moguls got their start at Keywest Studio, ranging from Roger Corman on only his second production (The Fast and the Furious) and Burt Lancaster in one of his Hecht-Lancaster pictures (Apache). And Glasser himself made his debut as a producer with Gold Raiders (1951), starring the Three Stooges (in their only feature film appearance with Shemp Howard in the trio) and one-time John Ford leading man George O'Brien, directed by Edward Bernds. A longtime associate of the Stooges from their work at Columbia Pictures, Bernds was also a good friend of Glasser's, and the two later formed a producer/director partnership in association with Robert L. Lippert's Regal Films, working on pictures such as Return Of The Fly and Space Master X-7. In 1960, he also moved into television for the first time as a producer, on the series Assignment: Underwater, with Bernds and his longtime associate Elwood Ullman coming aboard in the story department. Glasser subsequently moved to Europe in the 1960's and became part of producer/writer Philip Yordan production operation -- he was involved with movies such as Day of the Triffids, Battle of the Bulge, and Crack in the World, and, as part of the same cycle of films, was the executive producer of Andrew Marton's 1964 The Thin Red Line, based on the book by James Jones. He also occasionally worked as a writer and director, serving in both capacities on The Sergeant Was A Lady (1961) (which co-starred Assignment: Underwater's Bill Williams), and directing Run Like A Thief (1968) and the topical youth drama Triangle (1970), starring Dana Wynter and Tiffany Bolling.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide