Irving Lerner (March 7, 1909 – December 25, 1976) was an American film director.
Biography
Before becoming a filmmaker, Lerner was a research editor for Columbia University's Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, getting his start in film by making documentaries for the anthropology department. In the early 1930s, he was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League, and later, Frontier Films. He made films for the Rockefeller Foundation and other academic institutions, becoming a film editor and second-unit director involved with the emerging American documentary movement of the late 1930s. Lerner produced two documentaries for the Office of War Information during WW II and after the war became the head of New York University's Educational Film Institute. In 1948, Lerner and Joseph Strick shared directorial chores on a short documentary, Muscle Beach. Lerner then turned to low-budget, quickly filmed features. When not hastily making his own thrillers, Lerner worked as a technical advisor, a second-unit director, a co-editor and an editor.
Three of Lerner's films—A Place to Live, Muscle Beach, and Hymn of the Nations—were preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007, 2009 and 2010, respectively.[1]
Alleged Soviet espionage
Irving Lerner was an American citizen and an employee of the United States Office of War Information during World War II, and he worked in the Motion Picture Division. Lerner allegedly was involved in espionage on behalf of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU); Arthur Adams, a trained engineer and experienced spy who escaped to the Soviet Union in 1946, was Lerner's key contact.[2]
In the winter of 1944, a counterintelligence officer caught Lerner attempting to photograph the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory; Lerner was acting without authorization.[3] The model for the cyclotron was used for the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for uranium enrichment; and, research work at Stanford using the cyclotron led to the Manhattan Project at Hanford, Washington, dedicated to producing plutonium for the bomb dropped in Nagasaki.[4] Lerner resigned and went to work with Joseph Strick for Keynote Records,[2] owned by Eric Bernay, another Soviet intelligence contact. Arthur Adams, who ran Irving as an agent, also worked at Keynote.
