“I couldn’t put the thing together!” Hessler remembered. The first film he was assigned was directed by Jack Arnold, who would soon go to Hollywood to make pictures like The Creature From the Black Lagoon. “I had no formal education on editing,” said Hessler, who scrambled to learn the trade from anyone who would show him. Hessler worked as an editor first for a company called Films For Industry and then for Fordel Films, in the Bronx. “I took the film to all the editors, and each editor I met,, ‘Could you hire me?’ Finally I got hired in the documentary business.” Warner-Pathe News hired him as a driver, “which was perfect for me,” Hessler said. In New York, he took a night shift job at an automat (possibly the famous Horn and Hardart) while looking for movie work during the day. It was pretty tough – you couldn’t get financing.” Hessler opted to emigrate to the United States, figuring he’d have a better chance to break into filmmaking there. But he observed that “there was a depression in England in the film business. While still in the Army, Hessler knocked on doors in the film industry, working as an extra (somewhere in the background of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Duvivier’s Anna Karenina, he lurks) and talking his way into a meeting with Alexander Korda’s right-hand man. The end of the war meant that Hessler was entering the workforce just as thousands of servicemen came home to reclaim their old jobs. Hessler conceded that, having sensed the film industry’s potential for ageism early on, he had subtracted four years from his age at the start of his career. As a teenager he studied aeronautical engineering, and “at the tail end” of World War II he was conscripted into the British Army, although the war ended before Hessler saw combat.Īt this point during our 1997 interview I started counting on my fingers, because every reference source gave Hessler’s date of birth as December 12, 1930. His father died when he was three and Hessler, whose first language was German (but only “kinderdeutsch,” he said), moved back to England with his mother as “things got a little steamy there” in Germany. Hessler was born in Berlin, to an English mother and a Danish father, in 1926. He came across as so quintessential an English gentleman to Americans that I fear Hessler’s quiet ambition, and his attitudinal kinship with the “angry young man” generation of his countrymen, have been overlooked in accounts of his career. Hessler, with his sheepish grin and self-effacing air, was a genial and always accessible friend to film historians. Although mainstream outlets have yet to announce Hessler’s death, it has been confirmed by his wife Yvonne (via historian Tom Weaver) and a friend. Gordon Hessler, the British-born director who was best known for his horror films but who had a longer career as a producer and director of American episodic television, died on January 19 at the age of 87.
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