Kenneth Hyman, Warner Bros. Exec and Producer on ‘The Hill’ and ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ Dies at 97

Kenneth Hyman, who produced Sidney Lumet’s The Hill and Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and as a Warner Bros.-Seven Arts executive gave Gordon Parks the opportunity to direct his first feature, has died. He was 97.

Hyman died Thursday of natural causes in Oxfordshire, England, his friend Joie Gould told The Hollywood Reporter.

Hyman’s father was Eliot Hyman, the pioneering TV syndicator/film financier who co-founded Seven Arts Productions with producer Ray Stark in 1957. Kenneth Hyman also worked at Seven Arts, and after it bought Warner Bros. in 1967, he headed worldwide production for the newly combined company.

Parks, who had found fame as a news photographer for such publications as Life and Vogue, was looking to direct a film based on his semi-autobiographical 1963 novel, The Learning Tree, when he got a meeting with Hyman with the help of John Cassavetes. No Black person had ever helmed…