Ivan Abramson

Biography

Ivan Abramson arrived in America fresh from the Russian Empire, a twenty-something ink-stained refugee who had traded the censors of Vilna for the clamor of Lower East Side newsrooms. By 1914 the newspaperman had swapped type for reels, launching Ivan Film Productions at the very moment the movie business was still deciding what it wanted to be. Audiences—many of them immigrants like himself—flocked to his tabloid-tempered melodramas: The Sex Lure (1916), Enlighten Thy Daughter (1917), and the shock-headed A Child for Sale (1920) pushed screen propriety to the edge of the era’s envelope. Flush with notoriety, Abramson partnered with press baron William Randolph Hearst to create Graphic Film Corp., a short-lived but headline-grabbing alliance. His final credit, Meddling Women, hit theaters in 1924; a decade later, the onetime pioneer died in Manhattan in 1934, leaving behind a trail of flickering scandals and a map of how far early Hollywood was willing to go.