Profile of Herk Harvey on Famous Like Me

Harold A. "Herk" Harvey (June 3, 1924 – April 3, 1996), was an American film director.

Harvey was born in 1924 in Fort Collins, Colorado, the son of Everett and Minnie R. Prewitt Harvey. He was a graduate of Fort Collins High School and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Harvey came to Lawrence, Kansas in 1945 to study at Kansas University, where he majored in theater, directing and acting in stage productions, such as "Harvey" and "Beggar on Horseback". During his college years, he was vice-president of the Dramatics Workshop, appeared with the University Players, and was a member of the Owl Society. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in drama from the university in 1948 and 1950, and later taught and directed for the KU speech and drama department. Besides student appearances, he appeared in summer stock, with the Topeka Civic theater and with Kansas City's Resident playhouse.

Harvey broke into the film business as an actor in some of the movies being made by Centron Corporation of Lawrence, an independent industrial and educational film production company. He subsequently went to work for Centron as a film director for 35 years, making a variety of short industrial, educational, documentary, and government films. Several of these films have found their way into offbeat television shows of today, poking fun at the early production technology, mannerisms, and acting often found in these shorts, including Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Many of Centron's early productions were shot in and around Lawrence, but as their staff and their studio space expanded in the late 1950s, Centron film crews were dispatched to locations around the globe to bring back images for geography and travel films. Harvey often was assigned these bigger jobs. During the 1960s, large corporate clients, such as John Deere, AC Delco, Caterpillar Tractor, and Monsanto Chemical, hired Centron to help carry out their message to stockholders and consumers through film. Centron occasionally brought big-name Hollywood stars, such as Anita Bryant, Walter Pidgeon, Ed Ames, Eddie Albert, and the Rowan and Martin comedy team, to Lawrence to appear in these films. Harvey often got to work with these big stars, as well. Harvey's efforts for Centron garnered him numerous national and international awards, including an Academy Award nomination for a short Centron film he directed about a small, disabled local man and how this man overcame his disability and found relatively large success with his clock-making business.

Through all of his 35 years at Centron, from 1950 until 1985, Harvey displayed several unique personal qualities which are still well and warmly remembered by his former co-workers and friends. One was his ability to create excitement and generate the best performance from actors on the set. Another was his understanding of the problems of actors, actresses, crew people, and writers, knowing that working in a film was tedious work. And the one major quality that Harvey is best remembered for by all who knew him was the massive amount of energy, enthusiasm, and effort he put into his work. As his obituary stated, "No matter the size of the project, Harold A. 'Herk' Harvey also gave it his all." A cameraman who worked with Harvey at Centron remembered that once, both he and Harvey climbed to the very top of a water tower to get just the right shot of a banana plantation in Costa Rica. Back on the set at the Centron studios in Lawrence, Harvey would also strive for getting the best performance out of actors, the best sound, the best lighting, the best camera angles, etc., while experimenting with filmmaking techniques and attempting to make his day job more interesting all the while.

However, if it hadn't been for Harvey's one feature film, made independent of Centron, titledCarnival of Souls, a 1961 horror film that bombed upon its first release but later attracted a devoted cult following, probably no one in the general public would have heard of Herk Harvey. Harvey was driving home to Kansas from Los Angeles, where he had been shooting an industrial film, when he spotted an eerie pavilion-like structure standing on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, and, intrigued by its isolated location and "weird" look, he suddenly hatched the idea of making his first feature film, something about "dead people dancing in a ballroom on the Great Salt Lake." Harvey commissioned co-worker and best friend, John Clifford, a scriptwriter at Centron, to write the screenplay for the film. Meanwhile, Harvey raised $30,000 with the help of local businessmen, cast the movie, and scouted locations. Within a couple of weeks, the script was completed, and after casting the lead for the film, Candace Hilligoss, in New York, Harvey took a leave of absence from Centron and shot the film in two weeks on location in Lawrence and in Salt Lake City. Much of the cast (with the exception of the lead) were found in Lawrence, many of them having appeared in local civic theater presentations and in Centron films prior to this feature. The crew was made up mostly of Harvey's co-workers at Centron, as well. The film was extremely low-budget and met with a mixed reception at its premiere in Lawrence, and bombed further when it was placed in the hands of a crooked and almost-bankrupt distributor. But in 1989, after Harvey had already retired from Centron, young people and film buffs across the nation began to take notice of the old horror film and praised and admired the eerieness and haunting feeling it was able to provoke without turning to the blood and guts and what Harvey termed "physical horror" that was a common feature of horror films. They also praised the fact that the film had accomplished all of these things with meagre financing. Demand for the film grew, and Harvey and John Clifford agreed to release the original film on home video and make a series of appearances in movie houses and film festivals across the nation to talk about the film. Carnival of Souls ended up winning several festival awards and was the subject of hundreds of articles and favorable reviews in many prestigious newspapers and magazines. A revival of interest in the film was taking place. Eventually, an exhaustive and popular DVD release of the film, complete with countless extras regarding the making of the film, the film's locations, the life and career of Harvey, and Centron, was released by the prestigious Criterion Collection. Unfortunately, Harvey did not live to see the release and popularity of this DVD, for he died of pancreatic cancer in 1996, at his home in Lawrence. He had married Pauline G. Pappas during the 1960s and she survived, of the home. Harvey's other survivors included two nieces and one nephew.

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