Irving A. Block on AllMovie

Irving Block was a quadruple-threat artist in film -- as a production designer, special effects designer, producer, and writer -- but that was only one facet of a three-tiered career he enjoyed from the 1930s through the 1980s, as an artist, filmmaker, and teacher. He was born in New York City in 1910, and was raised in Brooklyn, where he attended public school. Block attended New York University and also took night courses at the National Academy of Design, though in addition to those institutions, he also credited the 42nd Street Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as sources for much of the knowledge that he picked up in those years. By the early '30s, he was struggling to find work along with most victims of the Great Depression, and became active in organizing groups of unemployed artists. Following the advent of Roosevelt's presidency, Block became one of numerous artists employed across the country by the Works Progress Administration, and it was during this period that his talent to social-realist painting manifested itself, in various works -- including many celebrated murals -- done as public projects across America. Across the next several decades, with an interruption for military service during World War II -- in which he worked as a map-maker for the Army Corps of Engineers -- he became highly respect for his paintings. Block joined the film industry after the Second World War; ironically, this was a time when the movie business was mostly starting to reduce its size and scope; but his abilities as an artist, coupled with a knack for writing and, as it turned out, producing, allowed him to thrive in this environment.

After getting his first screen credit on the ill-fated, British-made Lou Bunin version of Alice in Wonderland (1949) -- a basically good film that was buried by Disney in the run-up to its own Alice production -- Block received his first Hollywood credit (as I.A. Block) on Kurt Neumann's Rocketship X-M (1950), for which he did the matte paintings. This entre into Hollywood, and especially the orbit of Lippert Pictures, a B-studio with a strong interest in science fiction and fantasy films, proved extremely fortuitous for Block. He next worked on the special photographic effects for Unknown World, in addition to serving as producer of that movie, and, on an uncredited basis, performed did the special photographic effects for Monogram's release of Flight to Mars (1951). The quality of the releases to which Block applied his talents took a decided upward leap after those early efforts. He was one of the special effects designers involved with William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars (1953), and by the mid-'50s was working with two other special effects experts, Jack Rabin and Louis de Witt. From the mid-'50s to the end of the decade, the three of them were involved in an array of science fiction-oriented movies, variously producing, designing special effects, designing entire productions, and otherwise bringing various mostly low-budget examples of fantastic cinema to fruition. Again working with director Kurt Neumann, Block played an essential role in the making of Kronos (1957), one of the better black-and-white science fiction thrillers of the period. But his greatest work was Forbidden Planet (1956), on which he co-wrote -- with Allen Adler -- the underlying story that was the source for the movie, as well as working on the production design. If that movie was considered the height of science fiction cinema for the decade, it was balanced in his output by The Atomic Submarine (1959), a delightfully fast-paced science fiction adventure yarn that was decidedly more juvenile (though quite entertaining). Block, along with Rabin and de Witt, were also involved -- once more crossing paths with Adler -- on The Giant Behemoth. There were a few non-science fiction works along the way, including The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1957), but this was an oddity in his activities. Block also did some special effects for The Invisible Boy (1957), MGM's sequel to Forbidden Planet. By the end of the 1950s, however, the field of science fiction was losing its appeal in theaters. Block worked with Roger Corman on a pair of low-budget science fiction/fantasy efforts before moving into television for his last major body of work, the series Men Into Space. By the 1960s, he was out of the movie business and working full-time as a painter again. He joined the faculty of California State University at Northridge in 1964 and was a professor emeritus at the time of his death in 1986. By then, his paintings were being given retrospectives at top galleries and the Smithsonian Institution was preparing to honor him.