From slot machine titans to B-movie movers and shakers: the fabulous King Brothers!

Independent producers Maurice, Frank and Herman Kozinsky (or Kozinski) -known in the business as the King Brothers- had wild ideas, took crazy risks but also rejected glitz and glam in favour of the average American experience.   And they made out like bandits.  "We keep very close to the people," stated Frank King an interview with Murray Schumach for the New York Times.  "We go to movies in poor areas and in middle-class neighbourhoods.  The trouble with Hollywood is that too many people who make pictures don't see what the average American likes."  Writing in 1962 after the Kings had spent over twenty years in the entertainment industry, Schumach had to conclude something had to be working since "they had yet to make a loser."

Arriving in California with pockets jangling from profits made in the slot-machine business, the King Brothers took their first stab at producing movies with Paper Bullets (1941).  And who did they choose to work with?  Monogram Studios, which recognize their ability and gave them plenty of leeway.  In 1944, when the script When Strangers Marry became available for filming, Monogram President Steve Broidy handed it to the King Brothers.  "I felt they had the talent and the know-how to do that type of picture," Broidy said.  While Monogram kept final cut, Broidy left the Kings otherwise fairly free.  "We gave them a lot of latitude," said Broidy. Odds are, if you catch a Poverty Row movie that's half decent the King Brothers were probably involved.

Made for a shockingly low sum (between $20,000 and $30,000, about half of what it cost to make an ultra-low grade Republic western)  Paper Bullets had not been a winner, but one of its cast members was Alan Ladd.  When his star rose, the movie was re-released as Gangs, Inc. (this time with PRC) and new posters were cranked out with Ladd front and centre.  The King Brothers struck gold again with Dillinger (1945), one of Monogram's highest grossing movies.

Always hatching new ideas, the King Brothers' career in the business is characterized by slightly risky decisions that in the end seemed to have been timed perfectly.  In 1947, they toyed with the idea of tackling anti-Semitism, a topic not popular a few years before but just ripe for discussion after the war.  The project, a treatment of Arthur Miller's novel Focus, was eventually shelved.  In 1949 during a box-office slump, they floated the concept of allowing theatregoers to see movies and buy popcorn on credit.  The Kings could not let an opportunity to take a jab at industry hot shots pass by.  "The big theatre owners are lazy," Frank is quoted as saying. "They sit back on their haunches and sigh for the war days of big crowds and big money.  But they don't go out after business.  Meanwhile grosses keep dropping."  Despite the sluggishness, the King Brothers had another hit the next year with Gun Crazy, today a beloved part of the noir canon.

During the later 1940s, the King Brothers worked more frequently on the Allied Artists side of Monogram and were among the first producers to work with professionals whose lives had been devastated by the HUAC committee.  They chose Edward Dmytryk, who had served time for his role as one of the Hollywood Ten, to direct Mutiny in 1951.  Dmytryk had started his career in B's with the Kings, and in his biography described one of the brothers King as "a decent man and as good a B director as I've known."  In 1957 the King Brothers production The Brave One was awarded with an Oscar.  The script had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who had also been blacklisted.  "If a good story comes to us, we don't care who wrote it," commented Maurice.

I'll keep my eyes out for images of the King Brothers, as I only have epithets like husky, stocky and loquacious from newspaper clippings to go by.  Oh, they were in the marines and came from the Lower East Side, did you know?  Tough, clever guys.  "Nobody discovered us," said Morris (Maurice) in a 1945 interview.  "We discovered ourselves.  We didn't come into this business paupers and we won't go out of it paupers."