‘DIRECTED BY WYLER’ HONORS LATE DIRECTOR

Film directors spanning 50 years of Hollywood history honored their late colleague, William Wyler, here Wednesday night as “one of the handful of great American directors.”

The occasion was a Lincoln Center premiere screening of “Directed by William Wyler,” a documentary on the three-time Oscar-winning director of such film classics as “Jezebel,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Roman Holiday,” and “Ben Hur.” The film has been a five-year project of Catherine Wyler, one of the director’s four children, who is a public television executive. Catherine Wyler interviewed her father for the film in 1981, three days before he died of a heart attack at age 79.

The one-hour documentary, directed and edited by Aviva Slesin, shows both Wyler and the film industry he grew up with by way of rare interviews with Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck and Barbra Streisand.

“He was one of the handful of great American directors who knew how to exploit this medium so it would be like no other,” said director Robert Benton.

“You could take the last 50 films you have seen from this day and age, and together, they wouldn’t have the humanity found in one of Willie’s films,” said writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Benton and Mankiewicz were joined at the affair by Alan J. Pakula and Louis Malle. The directors sponsored the premiere, along with John Huston and Sidney Lumet, who were absent, and the American Museum of the Moving Image, now under construction.

Catherine Wyler said that she hopes to find a similar showcase for the documentary in Los Angeles.