Konstantin Kalser

Kalser was born in Munich on 4 September 1920, the son of actor Erwin Kalser and actress and screenwriter Irma von Cube. He was educated in Switzerland and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kalser moved to the United States in 1937 to join his mother in the entertainment industry. During World War II, he served in the United States Air Force; post-war, he became a photographer for Life magazine. ==Career==

In 1948, Kalser founded the film production company Marathon International Productions. At Marathon, Kalser produced some of the first newsreels intended for television and filmed the 1948 Winter Olympics for DuMont Television Network, the first to be broadcast on American television. Kalser produced several short films through Marathon during the 1950s and 1960s, the most prominent of which was the Oscar-winning Crashing the Water Barrier. the next year, the one- and two-reel awards (the latter held that year by The Bespoke Overcoat) would be merged into a single short film award. In 1966, Kalser admitted that Crashing the Water Barrier was produced by Marathon as an advertisement for an oil company. Kalser hoped the film would win another Academy Award. He additionally produced the Emmy-nominated For Years to Come for Chrysler. Kalser and Marathon would also produce non-advertisement works, such as The Unknown War, a syndicated docuseries on the Eastern Front conflict between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union during World War II. ==Personal life and death==

In 1957, Kalser was arrested and fined for speeding per hour in a per hour zone in New York. After paying the fine, he showed the judge a film he had produced not long before where his wife was driving the same speed; other cars were speeding past, with some pausing to berate her for driving too slowly. According to the Associated Press, "the judge complimented Kalser on his ingenuity". Kalser died of kidney failure at the age of 73 on 30 July 1994. He was survived by his wife, Martha Kalser, two children, and two stepchildren. At the time, he was living in Amagansett, New York. ==References==