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The producer, who began his career in his teens with a homemade newsreel camera, has never made a complete movie in Hollywood and has no use for the place. After producing four of his films for 20th Century-Fox, Individualist de Rochemont clashed with Individualist Darryl F. Zanuck, the studio's boss, over publicity and screen credits. He quit, moved over to M-G-M and quit again when the studio wanted him to make Lost Boundaries in its own way, i.e., with fictitious violence and a budget three times as large as the $500,000 he spent making it himself.
De Rochemont lives and works in Portsmouth, N.H., which played Eaton Falls in his latest picture. His production unit is full of young men, e.g., Associate Producer Borden Mace is 31; one of De Rochemont's insistent beliefs is that Hollywood's hardened arteries need young blood. Now in preparation (under a financing-releasing deal with Columbia Pictures that gives De Rochemont firm control of his "moviemaking): Walk East on Beacon, a thriller, based on FBI files, about attempts to steal a top U.S. secret whose existence the public still does not suspect. Last time De Rochemont made that kind of picture, The House on 92nd, Street, the secret, announced during production, turned out to be the atomic bomb.