Alan Pakula, Award-Winning Film Director, Producer Dies in Accident

Alan Pakula, the producer and director of more than two dozen motion pictures, including such hits as “Klute,” “Sophie’s Choice” and “All the President’s Men,” died Thursday in a New York automobile accident. He was 70.

Police in Suffolk County said Pakula was driving on the Long Island Expressway about 30 miles east of Manhattan when a metal pipe crashed through his windshield, striking him in the head. Severely injured, Pakula lost control of his 1995 Volvo, which crashed into a fence. The filmmaker, who lived in New York City, was pronounced dead at North Shore Hospital in Plainview.

Investigators said the pipe was apparently lying on the roadway and had been struck by the car ahead of Pakula’s, propelling it into the air and through his windshield.

A major force in Hollywood for more than four decades, Pakula had most recently made last year’s film “The Devil’s Own,” starring Harrison Ford as a New York cop who unknowingly shelters an Irish terrorist portrayed by Brad Pitt.

Pakula had also been working on a screenplay about the White House years of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Known as an actor’s director, Pakula told The Times in 1989: “As a director, you can orchestrate performances but you can’t give ‘em. You can make a good actor look bad, but you can’t make a bad actor look good. The trick is knowing when to say something and when not to.”

When a Times interviewer observed that all of Pakula’s films demonstrated good taste, the director said simply: “Believe me, I don’t have any magic. Sometimes taste is just being able to look and listen.”

Born in New York, the filmmaker graduated from Yale Drama School and worked as an office boy for agent Leland Hayward. Pakula started out modestly in Hollywood in 1949 as an assistant in the cartoon department of Warner Bros. He spent the following year at MGM and then a few at Paramount learning the ropes.

In 1957 he produced his first film, “Fear Strikes Out,” starring Anthony Perkins as baseball player Jimmy Piersall, who was battling mental illness.

Shortly afterward, Pakula and Robert Mulligan, the film’s director, formed Pakula-Mulligan Productions and established themselves as Hollywood Wunderkinder with their first film, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The 1962 drama starring Gregory Peck earned an Academy Award nomination as best picture and a Golden Globe Award for promoting international understanding.

The company made another five films with Pakula producing and Mulligan directing before Pakula took over the director’s chair in 1969 for “The Sterile Cuckoo,” about a lonely college girl named Pookie Adams, played by Liza Minnelli.

“Emotionally, I relate very strongly to stories about people going through a transition--from one place, stage, in their lives to another,” Pakula told The Times then.

The filmmaker said he became determined to make the movie after stumbling across the book in a Beverly Hills bookstore while his then-wife, actress Hope Lange, was shopping. After acquiring the film rights to the book, he put out the word unequivocally that any studio that wanted to make the picture had to accept him as director. Paramount gave him a chance. The film made Minnelli a star and removed any question that Pakula the producer could also direct.

The critically acclaimed thriller “Klute” came next in 1971, earning Pakula the London Film Critics Award for best director and Jane Fonda a best actress Academy Award.

“All the President’s Men,” a 1976 movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman about the downfall of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, earned Pakula a New York Film Critics award, a National Board of Review award and an Oscar nomination as best director. The film garnered eight Academy Award nominations and won four, including an Oscar for Jason Robards as best supporting actor.

Shocked by news of Pakula’s death, Robards said Thursday: “I can’t believe it. I not only worked for him, I loved him very much.”

The Nixon saga also earned Pakula the director of the year award from the National Assn. of Theater Owners.

Forming his own New York-based Pakula Productions in the late 1970s, the moviemaker went on to produce and direct most of his films and occasionally adapt screenplays from best-selling books. Among those were his scripts based on William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” about a Polish woman who had survived a Nazi prison camp; Scott Turow’s book “Presumed Innocent”; and John Grisham’s novel “The Pelican Brief.”

“Sophie’s Choice” earned a best actress Oscar for its star, Meryl Streep, and a nomination for Pakula for the screenplay. He was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America award.

In 1986, the durable Pakula scored the Grand Prize at the Avoriaz Film Festival in France for “Dream Lover,” although critics panned the movie.

Other well-known films directed by Pakula include “Comes a Horseman,” “Starting Over,” “See You in the Morning” (which he wrote as well as directed) and “Consenting Adults.”

Among the films bearing his producing stamp were “Love With the Proper Stranger,” “Baby, the Rain Must Fall,” “Inside Daisy Clover,” “Up the Down Staircase” and “The Stalking Moon.”

Pakula also produced a number of plays, with mixed results. Among them were “Laurette” with Judy Holliday, “Jennie” and “There Must Be a Pony.”

The filmmaker was an active supporter and fund-raiser for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

After his divorce from Lange, he married historian Hannah Cohn Boorstin, who survives him. Other survivors are five stepchildren, Chris and Patricia Murray, Robert and Louis Boorstin and Anna Boorstin Brugge, and six grandchildren.