Full Name Gerard Blattner Name Gerry Blattner Years active 1933–1976 | Occupation Producer Died 1992 (approx.) | |
 | ||
Born 1913 Liverpool, U.K. Spouse(s) Pamela Daniels
(divorced),
Pearl | ||
Gerry Blattner was a British Film Producer who worked on many films produced by Warner Bros. in the UK.
Contents
Career
Gerry Blattner was a British film producer and Executive Producer, best known for producing the Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated and Golden Globe winning feature film The Sundowners and co-producing the television adaptation of I, Claudius.
Son of Ludwig Blattner (also a film producer, as well as an inventor), Gerry (real first name Gerard) followed his father into the film business. He was a production supervisor on My Lucky Star in 1933, which was filmed at the Blattner Studios in Elstree. He was a production manager on The Edge of the World in 1937 at the age of 24, a film produced by Joe Rock, who leased a studio amongst the Elstree Studios complex from Gerry's father in 1934 and appointed Gerry the studio manager. By the 1950s he was producing or overseeing the production of many of the Warner Bros. films made at Elstree and elsewhere in Europe e.g. Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. in 1950-1951, Where's Charley? in 1952 as producer, Land of the Pharaohs (1955) as production manager, and Fanny in 1961. Although Raoul Walsh, with whom he worked on Captain Horatio Hornblower, described Gerry Blattner as the "studio head" in his autobiography (and mistakenly called him "Jerry"), he was actually the head of Warner Bros. European Film Productions.
In the contemporary Australian publicity handouts for The Sundowners, the section describing the choice of locations quotes (and describes) Gerry Blattner thus:
"The whole effect is a visual one," explains Gerry Blattner, the tubby English producer with a satisfied finality in his voice. "We want one half of the picture to have a background of deep green, hence Nimmitabel. The other half has to look burnt down - Port Augusta."
Personal life
Although born in Liverpool in 1913, he grew up in Hertfordshire after his father bought the Ideal Film Company studio in Elstree in 1928. He had one daughter, Sandra. Gerry and his first wife Pamela also lived in Elstree while he was working for Warner Bros. Simon Cowell's parents lived next door, and Gerry is credited with helping Simon to obtain his first job in showbusiness as a runner on the production of The Shining, which was made by Warner Bros. at Elstree Studios. Gerry died in the early 1990s.
Gerry and his father were honoured by the naming of Blattner Close in Elstree in the mid-1990s.