Biography

Edward Bernds

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Edward Bernds was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois. While in his junior year in Lake View High School, he and several friends formed a small radio club and obtained amateur licenses. In the early '20s there was considerable prestige for an amateur operator (a "ham") to have commercial radio licenses, and Bernds was in a good position to get into broadcasting when he graduated in 1923, a year when radio stations began popping up all over Chicago. He found employment--at age 20--as chief operator at Chicago's WENR. When talking pictures burst onto the scene in the late '20s, Bernds and broadcast operators like him relocated to Hollywood to work as sound technicians in "the talkies". After a brief stint at United Artists, Bernds quit and went to work at Columbia, where he worked as sound man on many of Frank Capra's '30s classics. He later graduated to directing two-reel shorts and then features.
- IMDb mini biography by: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com> (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)

In 1956 Bernds was nominated for an Academy Award by accident. The Academy wished to recognize the script for the Bing Crosby/Grace Kelly film High Society (1956), but accidentally gave the nod to a Bowery Boys epic of the same name, High Society (1955), written by Bernds and Elwood Ullman. To the end of his life, Bernds loved to show visitors his framed Academy nomination certificate, on the back of which was taped a subsequent letter from the Academy, thanking him profusely for acknowledging the error and refusing the nomination.
Interviewed in the books "Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers" (McFarland & Co., 1988) and "A Sci-Fi Swarm and Horror Horde" (McFarland & Co., 2010) by Tom Weaver.

[on working with Zsa Zsa Gabor in Queen of Outer Space (1958)] [She] was very difficult all through the picture. The producer, Ben Schwalb, went to the hospital with ulcers halfway through the picture. I was left to cope with her alone, and she damn near gave me ulcers! It always bothered me that here on this planet Venus, she was the only one who spoke with a foreign accent.
[on Buddy Adler, the head of 20th Century-Fox Pictures when Bernds shot Return of the Fly (1959) on the Fox lot] I knew him from Columbia [Pictures], and as a matter of fact I directed a couple of second units for him there--and I considered him an all-American no-talent. In shooting second units I simply could not get a decision from him. He was so afraid of [Columbia Pictures head] Harry Cohn that he was afraid if he made a decision and something went wrong, that Harry Cohn would rip his hide off.
[about Valley of the Dragons (1961)] That film has tremendous vitality on TV--I get checks that surprise me. I also get residuals on the Elvis Presley picture Tickle Me (1965) that Elwood Ullman and I wrote, and it seems to me that "Valley of the Dragons" makes me more money in residuals than "Tickle Me" does!
[about Queen of Outer Space (1958)] If the picture's shown on TV I won't watch it, because Zsa Zsa Gabor still gives me a swift pain.
[on Robert L. Lippert] . . . a rough, tough customer . . . if there were any such thing as reincarnation, that man would have been a pirate in an earlier incarnation.

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