Erich Pommer
As the head of production at Decla Film, Decla-Bioskop, and, from 1924 to 1926, at UFA, Pommer was responsible for many of the best known movies of the Weimar Republic such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Michael (1924), Der Letzte Mann / The Last Laugh (1924), Variety (1925), Tartuffe (1926), Manon Lescaut (1926), Faust (1926), Metropolis (1927) and The Blue Angel (1930).
He later worked in American exile before returning to Germany to help rebuild the German film industry after World War II.
[4] In 1912, Pommer concluded his military service and became a representative of the French Éclair camera company in Vienna, where he was responsible for film distribution to Central and Eastern Europe.
Pommer served in the First World War at the West and Eastern fronts, but injuries suffered in action led him to return to Berlin in 1916, where he was responsible for training recruits.
After the 1919 merger of Decla with the Meinert-Film-Gesellschaft, Rudolf Meinert became head of production while Erich Pommer took charge of foreign distribution.
Teil: Die Brillantenschiff (The Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship, 1920) and "Decla Weltklasse" (including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), under the direction of Robert Wiene) were created.
Schloß Vogelöd / The Haunted Castle and Phantom, under the direction of F. W. Murnau, as well as Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, were released.
The country's hyper inflation made expensive productions possible: at that time the work of several classical authors were adapted into movies, and internationally successful big budget films were released, including Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), Variety (1925), Faust (1926), and Manon Lescaut (1926).
Dupont, Lothar Mendes, and William Dieterle and actors Conrad Veidt, Emil Jannings, and Lya de Putti.
[13] Working for Paramount Pictures, Pommer produced two films starring Pola Negri, Hotel Imperial and Barbed Wire (both 1927).
[14] His films at MGM included The Demi-Bride with Norma Shearer, California with Tim McCoy, and Mockery with Lon Chaney.
His last silent productions were Asphalt directed by Joe May and Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna starring Brigitte Helm and Franz Lederer Pommer was a pioneer of sound film in Germany and of multiple language versions (MLV) as a means to cope with selling big productions to different countries: Melodie des Herzens / Melody of the Heart, made at the end of 1929 in Berlin, was produced in a German, English, French, Hungarian as well as a silent version.
The "Erich-Pommer-Produktion der Ufa" turned out several international box office hits in the following years, most notably Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), starring Marlene Dietrich.
They also helped two close friends, Fred Pinkus (a former business manager from Berlin) and his wife, silent movie star Eliza La Porta, who bought chinaware and glasses and then hand-painted them to sell to the higher-class department stores.
[24] Together with film director Curt Oertel and Horst von Hartlieb, director of the film distribution association in Wiesbaden, Pommer also established a voluntary self-control system for the German motion picture industry, which evolved into the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK), implementing a voluntary self-rating system for the movie industry modeled on the Hays Code in the USA.
He then attempted to launch Signature Pictures with Dorothy Arzner to produce American films in Europe, an endeavor that failed to obtain promised financing.
