Alan J. Pakula
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Alan Jay Pakula (7 April, 1928 - 19 November, 1998) was an American film producer, writer and director noted for his contributions to the conspiracy thriller genre.
Pakula was born in New York and educated at Yale, where he majored in drama.
He started his Hollywood career as an assistant in the cartoon department at Warner Brothers. In 1957, he undertook his first production role for Paramount Pictures. In 1962, he produced To Kill A Mockingbird, for which he received a Best Picture nomination in the 1963 Academy Awards. In 1969, he directed his first feature, The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minnelli.
In 1971, Pakula released the first installment of what would informally come to be known as his "paranoia trilogy". Klute, the story of a private eye's relationship with a call girl (played by Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar for her performance), was a commercial and critical success.
This was followed in 1974 by The Parallax View starring Warren Beatty, a similarly labyrinthine post-Watergate thriller notable for its experimental use of hypnotic imagery in a celebrated film-within-a-film sequence in which the protagonist is inducted into the mysterious Parallax Corporation.
Finally, in 1976, Pakula rounded out the "trilogy" with All The President's Men, another commercial hit considered by many critics and fans to be one of the best thrillers of the 1970s. The film was based on the bestselling account of the Watergate scandal written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Pakula scored another hit in 1982 with Sophie's Choice, starring Meryl Streep. His screenplay, based on the novel by William Styron, was nominated for an Academy Award. In later years, he largely focused on courtroom dramas, achieving commercial success with Presumed Innocent, based on the bestselling novel by Scott Turow, and The Pelican Brief, an adaptation of the John Grisham bestseller.
Pakula died in 1998 in a car accident.
Filmography
- 1969 The Sterile Cuckoo
- 1971 Klute
- 1974 The Parallax View
- 1976 All The President's Men
- 1979 Starting Over
- 1982 Sophie's Choice
- 1990 Presumed Innocent
- 1993 The Pelican Brief
- 1997 The Devil's Own
External links
- IMDB entry (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001587/)de:Alan J. Pakula