From the Paramount Gates to the Academy Awards
- adamjfowler
- Jul 5
- 7 min read
Brother Hank Moonjean's Five-Decade Love Affair with Cinema
There are moments in every life when destiny announces itself with the subtlety of a studio klieg light. For Armen Moomjiaan—the Armenian boy from Evanston who would remake himself as Hank Moonjean, Hollywood producer—that moment arrived on a sun-drenched afternoon in 1946, when he was lingering by the gates of Paramount Pictures, another starstruck teenager drunk on celluloid dreams.
What happened next reads like something from one of the golden-age scripts he would later shepherd to the screen: Marlene Dietrich, cinema's most enigmatic goddess, spotted the teenage dreamer and invited him onto her set. “Heady stuff for a teenage boy,” he would recall decades later, with characteristic understatement. In that instant, the architecture of his future crystallized. Hollywood had claimed another acolyte, though this one would prove more enduring than most.
Hank Moonjean celebrating his birthday in Tahiti on the set of MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty.
Moonjean's story is the story of Hollywood itself: from the twilight of the studio system through the gritty renaissance of the seventies and into the high-concept eighties. It is also the quieter story of a man who navigated the industry's treacherous social currents with uncommon grace, maintaining friendships across decades and scandals, keeping secrets in a town built on gossip, and sustaining a love affair—both with cinema and with his partner Bradley Bennett—that would outlast most of the stars he helped create.
The Education of a Producer
By 1952, the young man had earned his cinema degree from the University of Southern California (USC), where he had been a member of the California Beta chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon—a brotherhood that would prove as enduring as any Hollywood friendship. Founded in 1928, the chapter had already begun establishing the kind of network that would serve its members throughout their careers. After graduation came the Korean War draft, where Moonjean served with the 82nd Airborne's intelligence unit. When he returned to Los Angeles, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was seeking an interpreter fluent in Turkish. Moonjean's heritage became his entrance into the dream factory.
What followed was an eight-year apprenticeship under the industry's master craftsmen. At MGM in the 1950s, Moonjean learned the delicate choreography of film production, working his way from second assistant director to first assistant on a roster of films that reads like a syllabus in American cinema: Blackboard Jungle, Love Me or Leave Me, I'll Cry Tomorrow.
Top from Left to Right: (1) Hank Moonjean on the set of The Money Trap talking with actor Rita Hayworth; (2) Actor Sidney Poitier talking with Hank Moonjean on the set of A Patch of Blue; (3) Actress Agnes Moorehead and Hank Moonjean and on the railroad station platform in Danville Kentucky for the filming of Raintree County; (4) Director Vincente Minnelli discussing the script with actor Kirk Douglas on the set of Lust for Life. Hank Moonjean looking on and Walter Plunkett standing in the background.
But it was Raintree County, MGM's intended answer to Gone with the Wind, that would provide his true education in the intersection of art and human frailty. The cast (Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, Agnes Moorehead) represented Hollywood royalty at its most glamorous and self-destructive.
Moonjean had known Elizabeth socially, but working with her proved an exercise in elegant chaos. Chronically late but fiercely loyal, she would greet him each morning with a smile, knowing it would be him arriving with coffee and a key to her back door. Sometimes she would even invite him to crawl into bed, fully clothed, a gesture that spoke to the peculiar intimacy of film sets, where professional and personal boundaries dissolve under the pressure of shared creation.
Managing Montgomery Clift's demons fell largely to Moonjean. The crew adored "Monty," even dubbing him their "doctor" for the two suitcases of medications he carried. But Moonjean was often the one retrieving him "dead drunk on the car floor" before flights to location shoots in Kentucky, where mosquitoes, chiggers, and punishing heat awaited.
The Kentucky location shoot proved punishing ("mosquitoes, chiggers, rain and heat and more heat"), but it also brought unexpected moments of fraternal connection. It was on this production that two Sigma Phi Epsilon brothers found their creative paths intersecting: Walter Plunkett of California Alpha, who designed the film's elaborate period costumes, and Moonjean of California Beta, ever ready with scissors around his neck to "cut the corset ties so they could catch their breath." Such moments reminded him that brotherhood could flourish even in Hollywood's most demanding circumstances.
The production's most harrowing moment came when Clift crashed his car leaving a party at Elizabeth's house. She rode with him in the ambulance, covered in his blood, even offering her diamond ring to the driver when he demanded ten dollars to admit Clift to the emergency room. When MGM considered recasting after the accident, Elizabeth's response was immediate: no one else would take Monty's role. In an industry built on disposability, such loyalty was revolutionary.
The Architecture of Friendship
It was while working as MGM's Turkish interpreter that Moonjean first encountered George Cukor, one of Hollywood's most powerful gay men. Cukor was developing a project that required translation services, and MGM plugged in their newest bilingual assistant. Working closely with the legendary director, Moonjean quickly learned to navigate Cukor's formidable personality."Cukor had a brilliant mind and was extremely intuitive," Moonjean would write years later. "He had a tongue like a razor blade that could eviscerate a person in one sentence. Luckily for me, I wasn't Cukor's type. He preferred strong athletic types. But I was pleased because I knew Cukor liked me; if he hadn't, I wouldn't have lasted an hour."
The comment reveals much about the coded language necessary for survival in Hollywood's closeted golden age. Moonjean's own romantic life remained largely private until the early 1960s, when he met Bradley Bennett, beginning a partnership that would endure for more than five decades—a remarkable feat in any era, but particularly in one when same-sex relationships had no legal or social recognition.
From Left to Right: (1) Actress Catherine Deneuve and Hank Moonjean on the set of The April Fools; (2) Actress Jane Fonda and Hank Moonjean and on the set of Tall Story; (3) Actor Cesar Romero with Actress Agness Moorehead at a party.
Their relationship existed in the spaces between Hollywood's public facade and private reality. At Agnes Moorehead's legendary Christmas parties—"the first major holiday event of the Beverly Hills social calendar"—celebrities and industry insiders would gather in a carefully orchestrated display of glamour and discretion. As Moonjean recalled with evident amusement, one year Ethel Merman took a fancy to my partner, Brad Bennett "who I was living with. He was, at the time, half her age." The Broadway legend's boldness in pursuing a man she knew to be spoken for was quintessentially Merman—and quintessentially Hollywood. Such moments—tinged with comedy, competition, and desire—populated the social margins where gay Hollywood found its community.
Perhaps the most revealing glimpse into this hidden world came during an early 1980s evening at La Cage Aux Folles, a drag club on La Cienega Boulevard. Moonjean, Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and a few others made up an unlikely but perfectly Hollywood group, watching as drag queens performed flawless imitations of Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, and Carol Channing.
"Rock was very drunk," Moonjean recalled. Hudson, he noted, was "sweet as well as kind and thoughtful and amusing" when sober—"Sweet is not the usual adjective to use when describing a man, but Rock was sweet"—but "mean and belligerent" when drinking. The evening reached its crescendo when a drag queen's parody of Taylor as Cleopatra pushed too far. Elizabeth finally stood up with a dramatic "We are not amused," ending the party with a flourish worthy of her screen persona.
The Burt Reynolds Years
If the 1950s had been Moonjean's education and the 1960s his transition from assistant to producer, the late 1970s and early 1980s belonged to his unlikely partnership with Burt Reynolds. Together, they created a string of high-octane crowd-pleasers: The End, Hooper, Smokey and the Bandit II, Sharky's Machine, Stroker Ace. Working with Reynolds and director Hal Needham, Moonjean discovered a talent for managing controlled chaos, keeping action shoots on track through what colleagues described as an "affable, yet organized style."
Right: Hank Moonjean on the set of Cool Hand Luke with Actor Wayne Rogers in the background.
These weren't prestige pictures, but they were perfect expressions of American popular entertainment at its most unabashed. Moonjean understood something essential about cinema: not every film needs to be art, but every film should be honest about what it is.
Recognition and Reflection
The artistic pinnacle of Moonjean's career arrived with Dangerous Liaisons in 1988. Co-producing with British producer Norma Heyman, he navigated the complexities of Stephen Frears's elegant period drama starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer. The film earned multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture for the producers, and won three Academy Awards. It represented everything Moonjean had learned about balancing commercial and artistic imperatives.
In his later years, Moonjean became a keeper of Hollywood's memory, collecting movie advertisements from every studio and era before donating the collection to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His fraternal ties remained equally important to him. In Dallas Texas in 1993, at the 43th Grand Chapter Conclave, Sigma Phi Epsilon honored him with the Citation for career achievement in film and television. In accepting the award, he reflected on how those early bonds had sustained him: "I've met brothers all over the world with my work, and whenever I'm filming in the States, I look for the red door... Always feeling proud of our fellowship." For a man who had navigated Hollywood's labyrinthine social structures, the straightforward loyalty of fraternal brotherhood provided a different kind of anchor.
His 2008 memoir, "Bring in The Peacocks: Memoirs of A Hollywood Producer," was voted "Best Book of the Year" by Classic Images magazine. It was a fitting recognition for someone who had spent his career helping others tell stories.
The Last Frame
Sigma Phi Epsilon brother and vanguard of the Chicago Society, Hank Moonjean died on October 7, 2012, at his Hollywood Hills home, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 82. Bradley Bennett survived him, as did an extended family of nieces and nephews. His death was mourned throughout Hollywood, where he was remembered as one of the industry's most beloved figures.
In an era when loyalty was a rare commodity and friendships often proved as disposable as last season's scripts, Moonjean had somehow managed to remain both insider and outsider, witness and participant. He had seen Hollywood transform from a small company town built on dreams and delusions into a global entertainment machine, and he had adapted without losing his essential decency.
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