George Yohalem Biography

Enjoying a screen career lasting almost five decades, New York-born George Yohalem was at one time or another a scenario writer, production assistant, production supervisor, unit manager, and assistant director on scores of mostly low-budget films. Entering the picture business as a reader with the Paramount scenario department in the mid-1910s, Yohalem later wrote the 1916 drama Sally in Our Alley and became a unit manager at Universal. In the early '20s, Yohalem also wrote Lotus Blossom (1921) for Chinese star Lady Tsen Mei and, with Tod Browning, No Woman Knows (1921), a drama based on Edna Ferber's Fanny Herself. An assistant director on such talkies as The Past of Mary Holmes (1933), a tepid version of Rex Beach's The Goose Woman, and After Tonight (1933), Yohalem went on to become a supervising producer at Monogram Pictures in charge of such potboilers as The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1935). Working well into the 1950s, the veteran jack of all trades was the credited production supervisor on Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps (1956). ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi