[ad_1]
Edie Landau, who within the Seventies and ’80s was one of many few girls producing movies, working outdoors the studio system together with her husband, Ely Landau, to supply unconventional motion pictures to a mass viewers, died on Dec. 24 at her residence within the Century Metropolis part of Los Angeles. She was 95.
The dying was confirmed by her son, Jon.
Within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, due to figures like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, indie movie was related within the public creativeness with writer-directors too younger and eccentric for the studio system. Within the years earlier than then, the Landaus produced artistically bold indie motion pictures that adopted a distinct mannequin, adapting nice works of literature into motion pictures for each the massive and small screens.
Their focus was performs. Within the early Seventies, the Landaus began the American Movie Theater, which invited viewers to subscribe to common screenings of film variations of works by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee and others.
There had lengthy been motion pictures primarily based on nice performs like “A Streetcar Named Want” that totally translated theater into the idiom of cinema. However the American Movie Theater tried one thing completely different, faithfully abiding by the performs’ texts in easy, cheap productions.
The Landaus produced greater than a dozen movies, usually that includes eminent figures in stunning roles. In 1973, the tough-guy film star Lee Marvin appeared in a movie model of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” The subsequent 12 months, in an uncommon flip as a movie director, Harold Pinter oversaw the difference of Simon Grey’s “Butley.”
Trying again on the mission in The New York Instances in 2003, the movie historian and critic Richard Schickel described it as a “noble experiment,” with some productions that have been “near God-awful” and others that ascended to “masterful film making.”
Ms. Landau incessantly acted as a minder of budgets and an organizer on set, however over time she took on an more and more inventive function in her partnership together with her husband, significantly after he had a stroke within the Nineteen Eighties.
She took the lead in placing collectively “Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson” (1983), an authentic HBO drama starring Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason. She developed a relationship with the author Chaim Potok and shepherded his 1967 novel, “The Chosen,” into film kind in 1981 and right into a musical adaptation for the stage in 1987.
“It was a on condition that ‘The Chosen’ was to be a musical from the very starting, ever since Edie Landau approached me with the concept two and a half years in the past,” Mr. Potok advised The Instances in 1987.
Richard F. Shepard of The Instances praised the 1981 film for recreating Forties Brooklyn “with such constancy that the tree-lined quiet streets of Williamsburg and the actual Jewish life on them appear to have emerged intact from a just-opened time capsule.”
Edythe Rudolph was born on July 15, 1927, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Her father, Harry, was a minor-league baseball umpire who later labored as a projectionist at Manhattan film theaters owned by Edie and Ely. Her mom, Rose (Zatcoff) Rudolph, was an workplace clerk.
After graduating from Wilkes College with a bachelor’s diploma in schooling within the late Forties, Edie moved to New York Metropolis, the place she labored as an assistant at radio and tv manufacturing corporations, hoping to maneuver up the company ladder. Whereas working on the tv distribution firm Nationwide Telefilm Associates, she met Ely Landau, one of many firm’s founders. They married in 1959.
That 12 months, WNTA, a New York tv station owned by Nationwide Telefilm, started airing “Play of the Week,” an anthology collection that anticipated the American Movie Theater. Ms. Landau labored her manner as much as turn out to be govt vp of Nationwide Telefilm and oversaw a few of its authentic programming, together with “Play of the Week.”
The Landaus’ youngsters adopted them into careers behind the scenes within the performing arts. Alongside the director James Cameron, their son, Jon, produced “Titanic” (1997), “Avatar” (2009) and the just lately launched “Avatar: The Means of Water.” Their daughter Tina Landau is a distinguished theater director. And their daughter Kathy Landau is govt director of the Manhattan arts group Symphony Area.
Jon recalled how with the ability to work on the film adaptation of “The Chosen” launched his personal producing profession, and the way his mother and father invited the producer Hillard Elkins to a efficiency of a play written by Tina and carried out at her highschool, which led to its staging in knowledgeable Los Angeles theater.
Mr. Landau credited his mom with these breakthroughs. “She was the one who would make issues occur,” he stated.
Ms. Landau’s first marriage, to Harold Rein, resulted in divorce. Ely Landau died in 1993. Ms. Landau’s youngsters survive her, together with a stepson, Les Landau; 4 grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.
Pictures from her days as a movie producer reveal that Ms. Landau was usually the one lady in a room stuffed with males sporting fits.
She hit again at what she plainly referred to as “discrimination of ladies” in 1958, when she filed a proper grievance towards United Airways for not allowing her to board a Chicago-to-New York “govt flight” — a cocktail-and-steak journey designed for males solely. Ms. Landau — who later earned a regulation diploma from the College of West Los Angeles only for enjoyable — advised the airline that she was an govt, too.
The incident turned out to be a harbinger of repeated protests that lastly led to scrapping the flights in 1970.
After retiring, Ms. Landau wrote poetry. One concise work was titled “That Was Then, This Is Now”: “Please keep in mind that I used to be as soon as a serious govt, not only a home spouse,/So please belief me now to be C.E.O. … of my very own life.”
[ad_2]
Source link
