ANNISTON, Ala. — B-movie producer David F. Friedman has died in Anniston at the age of 87.

Friedman's niece, Bridgett Everett, said he died of heart failure Monday morning at a nursing home.

Friedman was an independent movie producer who was credited with helping create "gore" or splatter movies. He produced "Blood Feast" in 1963 for $24,500. His niece says the cult classic ended up netting $6.5 million for him and the other investors.

Friedman spent much of his career in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. He moved to Anniston in 1988 to be near family.

Visitation will be from 1-5 p.m. Saturday at K.L Brown Funeral Home in Anniston.

—Copyright 2011 Associated Press

Joanne Siegel, the wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and the model for Lois Lane, died today in California at the age of 93.

Her daughter, Laura Siegel Larson, is making funeral arrangements.

Mike Olszewski, president of the Cleveland-based, Siegel and Shuster Society, was stunned by the news.

"Joanne Siegel stands as a shining example for us all of a person who fought for justice for herself, her family and her husband's memory and did so with great dignity and resolve," he said. "She was the true model for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Lois Lane and lived up to the high standards they gave that character in real life."

Joanne Siegel delighted in telling the story about how she met Siegel and Shuster when she was just a teenager, 15 or 16 years old, in Depression-era Cleveland.

She placed an advertisement in the classified section of the Plain Dealer offering to model. Shuster contacted her and she modeled for him, never realizing that she would become the basis for Superman's love interest.

Over the years, other women in Cleveland claimed they were the model for Lois Lane, but Jerry Siegel said it was Joanne. He did admit that some of the traits of other women he knew might have influenced the character.

Joanne met Jerry in the 1930s, but they did not marry until 1948, after his divorce from Bella Siegel became final.

Joanne stuck with Jerry through the lean years in the late 1950s and the 1960s when Siegel found it hard to find work as a writer in the comic book field that he created. With the pending release of Warner Brothers Superman movie in 1978, and with the backing by the biggest names in the comic book industry at the time, Joanne and Jerry convinced DC Comics to give the Superman creators a lifelong stipend.

In 1999, three years after Jerry's death, the families filed a lawsuit for partial ownership of the character. After years of legal wrangling, a federal judge ruled in 2008 that the Siegel and Shuster families own a large share of Superman. The details are still being worked out.

Comics were not Siegel and Shuster's first choice. After failing to interest newspaper syndicates in their creation, they sold Superman to DC Comics and the familiar blue, red and yellow costumed character made his first appearance in "Action Comics" No. 1, in 1938.

Superman's fame grew exponentially until he became arguably the best know fictional character in the world.

Siegel wrote hundreds of stories over the years for DC, Archie and Marvel and other comic companies, but most of them were uncredited. It would be years before DC Comics agreed to include "created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster" at the beginning of every Superman story.

After Jerry died in 1996, Joanne Siegel returned to Cleveland and tried to find a place to lay half of her husband's ashes, something that he had asked her to do. She wanted to create a permanent memorial to her husband somewhere in the city where it could be viewed by the public. She wanted to donate his typewriter, scripts, his glasses and other items for the memorial, but no one in Cleveland was interested.

Some of the items eventually ended up at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood for the permanent Siegel and Shuster exhibit.

Joanne was last in Cleveland in 2009 for the first gathering of the Siegel and Shuster families during the Superman-themed Screaming Tiki comic book convention.

During that weekend, she visited Jerry Siegel's former house on Kimberley Avenue in Glenville which had recently been restored. Fans from around the world raised more than $100,000 in an Internet auction that sold works of art and other items donated by the biggest names in the comic book business.

A large Superman-style shield and a steel fence was erected in from of the house. A similar shield and reproduction of the pages of the first Superman story decorate a fence on Amor Avenue at the site of the apartment where Shuster lived.

Last week, the city put up street signs bearing the familiar stylized "S" insignia for Superman and honorary street names "Joe Shuster Lane" and "Lois Lane."

The signs are at the intersection of Amor Avenue and Parkwood Drive, at the site of the former Shuster home.Similar signs have been erected at East 105th Street and Kimberley Avenue, where Siegel lived and where the two did much of their work.

Many of the relatives are members of the Cleveland-based Siegel and Shuster Society, a group formed to honor the memory of the Man of Steel and his creators.

"It saddens me that she is gone," said Jerry Siegel's cousin, Irving Fine, who is a member of the society. "I wish she could have been around to see some of the things the society plans to do."


The veteran character actor with a flair for German-type accents also starred as the Nazi playwright in "The Producers."

Kenneth Mars, a farcical character actor best known for playing the police inspector with a creaky prosthetic arm in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic Young Frankenstein, died Saturday of pancreatic cancer at his home in Granada Hills, Calif. He was 75.

With a flair for German-type accents, Mars also appeared as the insane Nazi playwright who creates Springtime for Hitler in Brooks’ The Producers (1968) and as a Yugoslavian shyster in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972).

Mars has regular roles on TV as ranch owner Otto Mannkusser on the Fox series Malcolm in the Middle, as W.D. “Bud” Prize on Norman Lear’s Fernwood Tonight and its offshoot, America Tonight, in the late 1970s and as Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin’s fireman neighbor in He & She, a 1967-68 CBS series.

The Chicago native cultivated a robust career as a voice actor during his 40-plus years in show business, working on such projects as The Jetsons, The FIintstones Kids, The Little Mermaid, Duckman and Life With Louie. He was Grandpa Longneck in many installments of The Land Before Time series that ran on film, video and TV.

In a take-off on Lionel Atwill’s local police Inspector Krogh character with a mechanical wooden arm in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, Mars’ Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein sports an eye patch and monocle over the same eye, a disjointed wooden arm that moves in all manner of ways and an accent so thick even his own countrymen can’t understand him.

Mars also appeared in the Woody Allen films Radio Days (1987) and Shadows and Fog (1991), and in another dramatic turn, opposite Shirley MacLaine in 1971’s Desperate Characters. His stage appearances included the role of Martin Eliot in The Affair and Sir Evelyn Oakleigh in Anything Goes.

Survivors include daughters Susannah Mars Johnson and Rebecca Mars Tipton; their husbands, Gary Johnson and Wayne Tipton; and grandchildren Alex Tipton, Kate Johnson, Noah Tipton, Nick Tipton, Olivia Johnson and Sam Tipton.

Services will be private. Remembrances on his behalf can be made to Smile Train in Washington D.C.

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