L.B. Marcus; Award-Winning Screenwriter

Lawrence B. Marcus, veteran screenwriter of 18 feature films who received an Academy Award nomination for his scripting of “The Stunt Man,” has died. He was 84.

Marcus, based in New York until earlier this year, died Tuesday at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In addition to the Oscar nomination, Marcus over his 50-year career earned a Writers Guild of America Award and five more nominations, a Golden Globe, a Christopher Award and an Alfred Sloan Award.

Besides “The Stunt Man,” the 1980 black comedy starring Peter O’Toole, Marcus was perhaps best known for the 1968 film “Petulia,” starring George C. Scott and Julie Christie.

The screenwriter successfully adapted that script for director Richard Lester from John Haase’s novel “Me and the Arch Kook Petulia.” Called “brilliant” by film historian Leonard Maltin, the movie landed on several of its decade’s best-10 lists, including in James Monaco’s book “American Film Now.”

Marcus was initially troubled by his efforts on “Petulia,” he told an interviewer a decade ago, relating: “I finished the first 35 pages and sent them off to Richard with a letter telling him that this was silly, that I didn’t like the pages and that I quit. I got an immediate wire from him: ‘Love the pages; hated the letter; work.’ ”

Among Marcus’ other films were “Justine” for director George Cukor; “Going Home,” starring Robert Mitchum; and “Alex and the Gypsy,” starring Jack Lemmon and Genevieve Bujold.

Marcus also wrote occasionally for the small screen, including the television movies “The Five of Me,” “The Letter” and “Threesome.”

His wife, Viva Knight, said Marcus’ final screenplay was “The Homesman,” written for Universal Pictures and Paul Newman in the early 1990s, when the writer was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.

Born in Beaver, Utah, Marcus grew up in Chicago and had only an eighth-grade education.

He began his writing career while serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, scripting radio shows. Later he spent a year in London working with Douglas Fairbanks III, lived in Rome developing feature films and traveled to South Africa to do a story on diamond mining.

Marcus collaborated with such stars as actress Rosalind Russell and less successfully with eccentric rocker Jim Morrison, scripting a film for him only to have the singer destroy it.

In the 1980s, Marcus taught screenwriting at New York University.

He is survived by his wife; his son, Andrew of New York City; a sister, Geraldine Brittain of Bethesda, Md.; and one granddaughter.