Jenö Janovics

Biography

Long before multiplexes lined the boulevards, Jenö Janovics was already conjuring stories out of celluloid in Hungary. Between 1914 and 1917, from the director’s chair and the accountant’s desk alike, he steered two fledgling studios—Proja and Corvin—into creative overdrive, handing megaphones to the young firebrands who would soon be known as Michael Curtiz, Márton Garas and Alexander Korda. When war subsided, he crossed the Carpathians and christened a fresh banner, Transylvania, in 1918, weaving literature into light—classics reborn as flickering images that he personally hustled across the region, building a distribution web that carried even his earliest titles into mountain villages. Occasionally he stepped before the lens himself, trading ledgers for greasepaint. Two decades later, typewriter keys clacked in a Budapest office as Janovics supplied the Hungarian Film Bureau with compact, punchy scenarios for short films. Off-set, the spotlight followed him home: his wife was Lili Poór, the doyenne of Hungary’s dramatic stage.