Elder received the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for the movie Sounder, starring Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks[1] and directed by Martin Ritt.
Returning from the army, Elder immersed himself in the Harlem literary scene, receiving direct encouragement from poets Robert Hayden and Langston Hughes, among others and began honing his talent as a writer.
Elder served as director of the new Negro Ensemble Company's playwrights’ division from 1967 until 1969, and when they launched their first season at New York's St. Mark's Playhouse in 1969, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was selected for production.
[4][5] The Negro Ensemble Company’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was one of the most meaningful theatrical events of the late sixties, a culmination of Elder’s meditations on the black family unit in a hostile American society.
The play deals with a 1950s Harlem family—Russell B. Parker, a barber (portrayed by Ward in the original production) who spends most of his time reminiscing about his glory days as a vaudeville dancer, his two unemployed sons, who live on the edge of the law, and his daughter, who resentfully supports the family.
The subsequent productions of the play nurtured the stage careers of several prominent actors, including Denzel Washington, Billy Dee Williams, Keith David, and Laurence Fishburne.
A profound influence on the works of August Wilson and films such as Crooklyn and Boyz n the Hood, Ceremonies remains the definitive black American family drama and the blueprint for how to tell that story.
Pauline Kael, in her review of Sounder,[9] wrote: "The director, Martin Ritt, working from a scrupulous, unsentimental script by Lonne Elder III, based on the William H. Armstrong novel, avoids charging up the scenes [...] the movie earns every emotion we feel.
In the blaxploitation era, Elder scripted the most challenging example of the genre, a noir-infused crime melodrama called Melinda;[11] it starred actors Calvin Lockhart and Rosalind Cash.
The following year his collaboration with Richard Pryor resulted in the screenplay for Bustin' Loose,[12] [13][14] a comic tale of an ex-felon who finds redemption through driving a busload of handicapped children to a farm-land oasis.
He wrote A Woman Called Moses, the biographical TV mini-series of fugitive slave leader Harriet Tubman’s life, reuniting him with Cicely Tyson and featuring narration by Orson Welles.
Elder returned to the theatre bringing Splendid Mummer[16] to The American Place Theater in New York starring Charles S. Dutton, a monodrama about the 19th century life of the first African-American Shakespearean actor, Ira Frederick Aldridge.