[6] One of the "unsuccessful clients"[3] the William Morris Agency allowed him to take with him at the time that he had options on, was the actress Julie Christie, whose screentest for Doctor Zhivago they arranged.
Their next film was John Boorman's thriller Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Marvin, which is now regarded as a classic.
Adding Sydney Pollack to their production team for one project, they garnered critical acclaim for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Subsequently, the producing duo picked up Best Picture Oscar nominations for Raging Bull (1980) and The Right Stuff (1983), their last project together before Chartoff-Winkler Productions dissolved in 1985.
Winkler moved into the director's chair, debuting with Guilty by Suspicion (1991), a drama (which he also scripted) about the Hollywood blacklist that starred Robert De Niro, which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.
Winkler fared excellently at the box office as the writer-director of the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Net (1995), which spawned a series of the same name debuting on the USA Network in 1998.
Life as a House (2001) made its world debut at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival[8] and told the tale of a depressed dying man (Kevin Kline) who funnels his energies into rebuilding the dilapidated beach shack he inherited from his abusive father and, in the process, building bridges between himself and his disaffected son (Hayden Christensen).
[9] While his directorial career would last through 2006, Winkler continued to produce his share of films, including The Shipping News (2001), Enough (2002), the 2014 remake of The Gambler—he'd also produced James Toback's 1974 original—and his further return to the Rocky franchise with Rocky Balboa (2006) and the spin-offs Creed (2015), which was nominated for multiple awards including 6 NAACP Image Awards, winning 4,[10] and Creed II (2018).
[11] The New York Times wrote: "Winkler looks back fondly on a career producing some of the most successful films of the 20th century.