Emmy-winning director Stuart Rosenberg Dies
Early television successes like Twilight Zone, hit later with
features Cool Hand Luke, Amityville among others
Culver City, CA — Stuart Rosenberg, a director whose early television success led to a thriving career in feature films, died of a heart attack on March 15 in Beverly Hills. Rosenberg, an Emmy Award winner best known for the movies Cool Hand Luke and The Amityville Horror, was 79.
Brooklyn Native Finds His First
Break in Television Editing
Born in Brooklyn on August 11, 1927, Rosenberg studied at New York University. An apprenticeship as a television editor led to directing assignments on such series as Naked City, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Untouchables.
He also directed three episodes of The Twilight Zone, including a memorable 1960 story, “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” in which three astronauts land on a strange, forbidding planet that turns out to be Earth. In 1963 he won an Emmy for an episode of The Defenders.
While working in television he also branched into feature films, most notably with the 1961 production Question 7, a drama about religious persecution in Germany, which won an award at the Berlin Film Festival.
Found Cool Hand Luke Novel by Chance While
Browsing L.A. Bookstore
Rosenberg was browsing in an L.A. bookstore when he came across the novel Cool Hand Luke, by Donn Pearce. The story of a prison camp inmate who refuses to bend to authority became a 1967 film starring Paul Newman in the title role. The acclaimed drama earned a best supporting actor for co-star George Kennedy and a Directors Guild of America nomination for Rosenberg.
Although he worked with Newman on three more films—WUSA, Pocket Money and The Drowning Pool—Cool Hand Luke, which coined the memorable line, “What we have here is failure to communicate,” spoken by the sadistic prison captain, played by Strother Martin, remains their most enduring collaboration.
During the late 1960s and throughout the ’70s Rosenberg worked with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood—Elliott Gould in Move, Walter Matthau in The Laughing Policeman, Charles Bronson in Love and Bullets Faye Dunaway in Voyage of the Damned and Robert Redford in Brubaker.
Amityville Director Taught a New Generation
of TV/Film Hitmakers at AFI
He enjoyed his greatest commercial success with the supernatural thriller The Amityville Horror, inspired by the harrowing events reported by a Long Island family after they moved into a house where several murders had taken place years before.
Following Brubaker in 1980, Rosenberg made three more films, most notably the 1984 drama The Pope of Greenwich Village. He went on to teach directing at the American Film Institute, where his students included several future filmmakers of note, including Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream), Todd Field (Little Children), Scott Silver (The Mod Squad), Mark Waters (Mean Girls) and Doug Ellin (Entourage).
He is survived by Margot, his wife of more than 50 years, and a son, Benjamin, a film editor.