Lawrence Turman

After spending time working in the family textile business, Lawrence Turman entered show business as a talent agent in the 1950s. By 1960, he had formed a producing partnership with Stuart Millar that yielded the soapy "The Young Doctors" (1961) and the critically recognized political drama "The Best Man" (1964). Turman had perhaps his crowning achievement early as co-producer of Mike Nichols' seminal "The Graduate" (1967). After scoring with the film version of the Broadway drama "The Great White Hope" (1970), he entered into a prolific collaboration with fellow producer David Foster that resulted in such well regarded Broadway-based films, like "Mass Appeal" (1984) and youth films, like "Short Circuit" (1986) and "Gleaming the Cube" (1989). Joining with Emese Green, the newly formed TFG Films produced the Meryl Streep adventure film "The River Wild" (1991). That same year, Turman accepted the directorship of the Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program at USC. More recently, he and John Morrissey created a new producing entity whose first feature was "American History X" (1998), starring Edward Norton and Edward Furlong. Lawrence Turman died on July 1, 2023 at the age of 96.