Frank Yablans

Who is Frank Yablans?

Frank Yablans is an American film producer and screenwriter The son of a Brooklyn cab driver and brother to fellow film producer Irwin Yablans, Yablans' first employers in the film business included Warner Bros., The Walt Disney Company and Filmways. He became Executive Vice President of Sales for Paramount Pictures in the late 1960s; in that position, his expert marketing of the film Love Story led to his appointment as Paramount Studios' President in 1971, a position he held until 1975. Following his presidency at Paramount, he became an independent producer, working primarily through Paramount and 20th Century Fox. He was executive producer of such films as Congo, Silver Streak, and The Other Side of Midnight and wrote and produced Mommie Dearest. Yablans was then recruited by Kirk Kerkorian to head his troubled and debt-laden film company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. While Yablans' reorganization of MGM and United Artists into a single entity as MGM/UA served to reduce costs and overhead, the company continued to lose value, and Yablans' tenure was equated to the demise of the studio in Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM, a book by Peter Bart, presently the editor of Variety, who was hired by Yablans as MGM's senior vice president for production in 1983.