PIONEERING PRODUCER OF FILMS ‘WEST SIDE STORY’, ‘GREAT ESCAPE’
Mirisch, a film producer who with his two brothers ran a pioneering independent production company that helped bring to the screen a raft of canonical films, including Oscar bestpicture winners “West Side Story,” “The Apartment” and “In the Heat of the Night,” died Feb. 24 in Los Angeles. He was 101.
His death was announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which he once led.
The Mirisch Co., which Mirisch founded in 1957 along with his brother, Marvin, and his half brother Harold, grew to be an industry powerhouse, greenlighting films by leading directors — including John Ford, John Huston and Billy Wilder — that were nominated for a total of 87 Academy Awards and won 28.
Walter Mirisch, who was considered the most artistically inclined of the three brothers, helped guide the company through a time of transition for the industry in the late 1950s and ’60s, when the studio system had lost its grip on Hollywood and the small screen of television was threatening the cultural primacy of the big screen.
The shifting currents in the industry provided a ripe opportunity for a forwardlooking producer like Mirisch, who matched an old-time studio chief’s box office instincts with a strong commitment to creative freedom and boldly ambitious films. Although he was known as a perfectionist who sweated the details of films through every step of production, he also knew when to step back and let great directors direct.
“All the Mirisch Company asks me is the name of a picture, a vague outline of the story and who’s going to be in it,” Wilder was quoted as saying in “The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily,” a 1970 biography by Tom Wood. “The rest is up to me. You can’t get any more freedom than that.”
Wilder notched the company’s first best picture award with “The Apartment,” a 1960 comedy with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine about an insurance clerk’s quest to climb the corporate ladder by letting his superiors use his pad for illicit trysts.
Affable and unassuming, Mirisch never fit the cliché of the imperious, dictatorial Hollywood producer. Crime novelist Elmore Leonard dedicated “Get Shorty,” his biting 1990 Hollywood satire, “To Walter Mirisch, one of the good guys.”
Even so, good guys do not last long in Hollywood without producing hits. The Mirisch Co. delivered, cycling through Hollywood’s many genres — its films included the ambitious, star-studded Western “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), the World War II adventure epic “The Great Escape” (1963) and the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof ” (1971), as well as enduring comedies like “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Pink Panther” (1963).
“You cut the pattern to fit the cloth,” Mirisch said in a 2013 interview with Tribute.ca, a Canadian film site, referring to his diverse assortment of films.
His commitment to “inform” also meant tackling the pressing issues of the day, as with “In the Heat of the Night,” Norman Jewison’s 1967 film about a Black deWalter
tective from Philadelphia (Sidney Poitier) who helps the bigoted police chief (Rod Steiger) of a small Mississippi town investigate a murder.
“Before we made the picture, I was told by financiers, ‘You will start riots in the South with this picture,’” Mirisch recalled in a 2004 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I said if it doesn’t play in the South, it doesn’t play in the South. What it has to say is so very important that the picture has to be seen.”
Walter Mortimer Mirisch was born Nov. 8, 1921, in New York, one of two sons of Max Mirisch, a tailor from Krakow, Poland, and Josephine (Urbach) Mirisch. (Harold was one of Max Mirisch’s sons from his first wife, who died of cancer).
With his father’s business struggling, the family moved to Milwaukee in 1940. Mirisch earned a degree in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1942, followed by a graduate degree from Harvard Business School. Unfit for military service because of a heart ailment, he worked as a technical writer at a bomber factory in Burbank in the later years of World War II.
Mirisch is survived by his sons, Andrew and Lawrence; a daughter, Anne; a granddaughter; and two greatgrandsons. Patricia Mirisch, his wife of 60 years, died in 2005.