Named in 1939 by movie producer Hal B. Wallis (1898-1986) and his first wife, comic actress Louise Fazenda (1895-1962). Their only child was Hal Brent Wallis (1933-2006), who went by his middle name, so “Halbrent” is either a tribute to him or a father-son portmanteau. (Reports that the “B” in Wallis Sr.’s name also stood for Brent are false: it came from Blum, his mother’s maiden name.) Wallis was born Aaron Wolowitz in Chicago; his parents Jacob and Eva were Jewish immigrants from somewhere in the Russian Empire (accounts vary). He was listed as Harold Wolowitz in the 1910 census and Harold Wallis in the 1920 census – his dad left the family in the interim, so I can’t say if the Wolowitzes became Wallises before or after the split. At any rate, Wallis’s sister Minna came to L.A. in 1921, so he, their sister Juel, and Eva joined her a year later. Minna was then hired as secretary to movie mogul Jack Warner, which led to Wallis working his way up the Warner Bros. ladder, from publicist to head of production. (Minna herself would later be a top talent agent.) After overseeing WB classics like Little Caesar, Jezebel, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca, Wallis formed his own production company in 1944. There he made Oscar-winning features like Becket and True Grit as well as various non-Oscar-winning vehicles for Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley. P.S. It’s possible that the Wallises’ son Brent, who became a psychiatrist, was named after actor George Brent, a family friend.
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