Stage and film producer and writer George W. George died 7 November 2007 of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. Born George Warren Goldberg on 8 February 1920 in New York City, he was the son of cartoonist Rube Goldberg. He may be best known for having produced the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, which consists almost entirely of a dialogue between two characters.
His genre work as a screenwriter included Two Little Bears (1961), The Son of Robin Hood (1958), and The Rocket Man (1954). As a producer, his genre films included Night Watch (1973) and Twisted Nerve (1968).
Some of his Broadway productions fall within our field as well, though they weren’t terribly successfuly. Via Galactica, which had 15 preview performances before opening in 1972, closed after only seven performances. And Happily Never After, which had seven preview performances, opened in 1966 and closed three days later, after only four performances. But Broadway has always been a hard sell for speculative fiction.
According to George’s daughter Jennifer, quoted in the New York Times, her grandfather received a lot of hate mail for his political cartoons during World War II, so “to protect his sons, Thomas and George, he insisted that they change their surnames. Thomas chose George, and George did the same, wanting to keep a sense of family cohesiveness.”
After attending Williams College, George married Jacqueline Richards in 1942 while he was in the Navy. That marriage ended in divorce. He married Judith Ross George, his sometime collaborator, in 1956 (she died last year).
Besides Jennifer (the only child of his second marriage), George is survived by his brother, Thomas; three children from his first marriage, Linda Tai, Laurie, and Larry; and three grandchildren.