Ivan Abramson

Biography

Ivan Abramson arrived in the United States from czarist Russia in the early 1890s, a twenty-something journalist who swapped Cyrillic for Yiddish and set New York’s Jewish weeklies humming. Newsprint soon felt too small: in 1914 he launched Ivan Film Productions and began serving up melodramas that crackled with vice, sin and just enough lingerie to keep censors sniffing around. Teaming with press titan William Randolph Hearst, he co-created Graphic Film Corp., turning scandal into box-office electricity. Over the next decade audiences gasped at The Sex Lure (1916), recoiled from the baby-trafficking expose A Child for Sale (1920), and debated the morals of Enlighten Thy Daughter (1917). After one last salvo, Meddling Women (1924), Abramson left the flickering screen behind, dying a decade later in Manhattan in 1934, his reels still sizzling in the canisters.