Michael Ritchie; Cost-Conscious Director of ‘The Candidate’ and Other Hit Films

Michael Ritchie, who became known in his youth as Hollywood’s boy wonder of low-budget spectaculars and went on to direct hits--including arguably his best, “The Candidate”--and a few box office misses, has died. He was 62.

Ritchie, who directed Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer” and in “The Candidate,” died Monday in New York of prostate cancer.

Among Ritchie’s other well-known and financially successful motion pictures were Chevy Chase’s “Fletch” films, “Prime Cut,” “The Bad News Bears,” “Semi-Tough,” “The Golden Child” and “Diggstown.”

His 1975 dark satire of beauty pageants, “Smile,” with Bruce Dern and Barbara Feldon, was critically acclaimed but a box office bomb. Film historian Leonard Maltin has called it one of the decade’s best unsung films, and one national critic cited it last year along with the two Redford films as three of the best modern American films.

Ritchie’s edgy 1970s features were echoed in the top-quality cable television show “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom,” starring Holly Hunter, in 1993.

Entertainment insiders rarely mentioned Ritchie without adding accolades about his intelligence and ability to complete productions efficiently and economically. He stuck to budgets, Ritchie once told The Times, because that usually could be traded for creative control.

Yet, never one to follow any Hollywood mold, he welcomed a re-editing by Francis Ford Coppola, which finally brought his four-decade-old dream to theaters last year. The film was “The Fantasticks,” Ritchie’s adaptation of the long-running stage musical he first saw shortly after it opened in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1960. Ritchie filmed it in 1995, and bucked the Hollywood anti-musical tide to win release after Coppola volunteered to help five years later.

“The delay was worth it,” said Times film writer Kevin Thomas, “because the result is pure enchantment that emerges as an inspired transposition of a musical to the screen.”

Born in Waukesha, Wis., Ritchie grew up in Berkeley, where his mother was a librarian and his father taught experimental psychology at UC Berkeley. Young Ritchie, who spent a couple of summers working for the San Francisco Chronicle, went off to Harvard to study history and literature, planning to become a teacher.

But there he got into producing and directing--and began building his reputation for low-cost-for-top-quality work. He produced one play for $7.50, and then, for only $500, made a hit out of a fellow student’s script, “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad.”

Ritchie not only directed, but staged a dazzling publicity campaign, inviting President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who regretted) and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev (who failed to respond) to the premiere. Ritchie reaped sold-out performances, attention from Boston critics, eventual productions in New York and London, a motion picture and two post-graduation job offers--one from a top New York publicist and one from Robert Saudek, producer of television’s “Omnibus.” He chose the latter.

Ritchie worked on cinema-verite documentaries, a style he would later adapt into his fictional films, and came to Hollywood as Saudek’s associate producer of the “Profiles in Courage” series. His first solo directorial effort aired in 1965, with “John Quincy Adams,” in which he managed to stage a spectacular sea battle for only $250.

As a freelance television director, Ritchie took jobs others refused--like a four-part “Dr. Kildare,” which had no script or cast three days before shooting. He honed his skills with segments of “Route 66,” “Run for Your Life” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

When Redford decided to do a film about a self-focused Olympic skier, he came to Ritchie to direct what would be his first feature, “Downhill Racer.” Redford liked the creative and collaborative effect so much he again enlisted Ritchie for the more successful “The Candidate,” a film about how the campaign process changes a person seeking public office.

Ritchie told The Times presciently when the political film opened in 1972: “The statement the picture makes is that if Ralph Nader ran for president, he would no longer be Ralph Nader. The process changes and corrupts, and I believe this is something the people are responsible for. Not the machine, and not the media.”

When told a few weeks later that both Republicans and Democrats were complaining of the film’s portrayal of American politics, Ritchie said, “Why not? It’s a pox on both their houses.”

Ritchie is survived by his wife, Jimmie; five children, Steven of Berkeley, Lauren of Los Angeles, Jessica of San Anselmo and Lillian and Miriam of New York; two stepchildren, Nelly and Billy Bly; a brother, John, and a sister, Elsie.