Director of ‘Cat Ballou’ and ‘A Man Called Horse,’ Dies at 96
He also was the guiding force behind the establishment of the Director’s Cut, part of the DGA’s landmark Bill of Creative Rights.
Elliot Silverstein, who helmed episodes of TV shows like Naked City, The Twilight Zone and Route 66 before guiding Lee Marvin to best actor Oscar in Cat Ballou, his feature directorial debut, died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 96.
The Boston native also helmed A Man Called Horse (1970), which starred Richard Harris in the title role as an English aristocrat who eventually becomes the leader of the Native tribe that had captured and tortured him. The action movie spawned a couple of sequels.
Silverstein came up with the idea for the film’s Greek chorus, played by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye. Those characters were not in Frank Pierson and Walter Newman’s original script.
“That set the style of the piece for me,” he said at the DGA’s Visual History Program. “Once I had managed to get that, I knew that it would give me license to go very far with the rest of the characters and be funny.”
The son of a doctor, Elliot Silverstein was born on August 3, 1927, in Boston and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
He attended Roxbury Memorial High School for Boys; Boston College, where he changed his major from biology to drama; and Yale University to pursue directing.
After producing and directing plays for Brandeis University — including one with Leonard Bernstein conducting — he helmed and staged productions for the Sunday TV series Omnibus in 1955-56.
For Broadway in 1958, he directed the comedy Maybe Tuesday, written by Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen and featuring Brett Somers, and Alice Ghostley, but it lasted just 5 performances.
Silverstein started working in episodic television, landing on series including The U.S. Steel Hour, Suspicion, The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen, Route 66, Have Gun — Will Travel, Naked City, Dr. Kildare, The Twilight Zone and The Defenders.
It was on The Obsolete Man, starring Burgess Meredith as a librarian, that his editor refused to cut the ending of the episode that way he wanted.
He discovered that a director’s rights were limited, that they only had the right to view the first rough cut and to communicate improvements to the associate producer.
With Silverstein’s urging, DGA president George Sidney authorized the creation of a committee in November 1963.
The group, which included Altman and Sydney Pollack and chaired by Silverstein, met each Sunday for six months and came up with the Bill of Creative Rights, released in April 1964.
“It was a manifesto of the young Turks from New York invading Hollywood, and now we were going to say how things should be done,” he said.
“The arrangement of the recorded images and sounds in a relationship the Director considers proper shall be known as the ‘Director’s Cut,’” the document read. “It is the Director’s creative right and obligation to prepare this cut, and he must be given the time he deems necessary to fulfill this function.”
In 1964, the DGA got the Bill of Creative Rights, including the Director’s Cut, into its new contract with producers, a provision regarded as cornerstone of director’s rights.
Silverstein also directed The Happening (1967), starring Anthony Quinn, and the cult horror film The Car (1977), starring James Brolin, and, more recently, episodes of Picket Fences and Tales From the Crypt.
He taught at USC after his retirement.
He was married three times, including once to actress Evelyn Ward, mother of singer-actor David Cassidy.
