Elliott Kastner (January 7, 1930 – June 30, 2010)[1] was an American film producer, whose best known credits include Where Eagles Dare (1968), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Missouri Breaks (1976), and Angel Heart (1987).
Kastner's first film as producer was Bus Riley's Back in Town (1965) based on a script by William Inge and starring Ann-Margret and Michael Parks.
Kastner then teamed up with producer Jerry Gershwin to form Winkast Film Productions, based at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.
They wound up making eleven movies together, the first of which was the highly popular Harper (1966) from a novel by Ross Macdonald and directed by Jack Smight.
[1] Winkast then made The Bobo (1968), starring Peter Sellers and his then-wife Britt Ekland, and Sweet November (1968), with Sandy Dennis.
The producer had managed to persuade Alistair MacLean to write an original screenplay as a vehicle for Richard Burton (it was later turned into a novel).
[6] The movie was a big hit and led to Kastner adapting several other MacLean stories and working with Burton a number of other times.
In the late 1960s Kastner wanted rock star Jim Morrison to play Billy the Kid in a movie adaption of Michael McClure's The Beard.
Kastner also partnered up with noted producers Alan Ladd, Jr. and Jay Kanter and together they produced the films The Walking Stick, The Severed Head, Tam Lin, Villain (1971), The Nightcomers (1972) (directed by Michael Winner, with Marlon Brando), X Y & Zee (1972) (with Burton's then-wife Elizbaeth Taylor) and Fear Is the Key (1972) (from a novel by Alistair MacLean).
The latter two both starred Robert Mitchum as Marlowe and were financed by Lew Grade's ITC; The Big Sleep was shot un Britain under the direction of Michael Winner.
"[5] He added "If Elliott believed in some material, he'd never hesitate to put his own money into buying it and hiring writers to develop a screenplay.
Mostly he wanted to entice well-known playwrights and novelists to write screenplays, or gain the rights of those works whose authors were no longer around to cajole.
Peter Bart, an executive at MGM at the time, called Katner "a maverick filmmaker... a stooped, rumpled, wizened little man" who "had a reputation in the industry for coming up with deals that were far more intriguing than his movies.
There is an oft-told story that Marlon Brando finally said yes to doing Missouri Breaks because he could not face the prospect of Elliott Kastner, on his knees, crying in front of him one more time.
Kastner's career was marked by a number of lawsuits, including with Mickey Rourke[16] and David McClintick,[17] and over the film Frank and Jesse.
He excelled in literary adaptations, from popular works such as those of Raymond Chandler and Alistair MacLean to the more esoteric output of such writers as Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov and Edna O'Brien.
He also favoured tales with strong, single-minded heroes and produced films featuring such actors as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Robert Mitchum, Burt Reynolds and Richard Burton.