Lawrence P. Bachmann, a film writer and studio executive at RKO, MGM and Paramount, has died. He was 92.
Mr. Bachmann died Sept. 7 in Los Angeles, his family said.
Mr. Bachmann was born in New York where his father, J.G. Bachmann, worked at Paramount with B.P. Schulberg in the 1920s. Young Lawrence started in pictures when he was 16 as an assistant film cutter at Universal before college.
After earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Southern California and a master’s degree at Oxford University, he became an assistant to Pandro Berman (the name as published has been corrected in this text), head of production at RKO.
Later he moved to MGM working for J.J. Cohn, the head of the B-unit, which produced small films that were part of the double-feature bill in theaters in the past.
As a writer, Mr. Bachmann’s first big success was the 1936 film “Speed,” starring James Stewart. He also wrote many of the scripts in the Dr. Kildare film series.
Mr. Bachmann served in the Army Air Forces during World War II and was the main overseas correspondent for Air Force magazine.
After the war, he worked in Berlin as head of films for the State Department.
He lived in Italy and France before moving to England, where he was the head of production first for Paramount and then for MGM. For MGM he was executive producer of “Children of the Damned,” and producer of the “Miss Marple” series with Margaret Rutherford and “Follow the Boys” (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
His final film was “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” starring Richard Dreyfuss.
