Leslie Stevens

Writer/producer/director Leslie Stevens sold his first play, entitled Mechanical Rat, to Orson Welles's Mercury Theater when he was 15 years old. He continued writing, graduated from Yale Drama School, and after achieving the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, turned to producing and directing for the stage. He began in movies as a writer with Arthur Penn's Left-Handed Gun, a psychological study of the life of Billy the Kid starring Paul Newman, and produced and directed his first film, Private Property based on his own screenplay (1960). Marriage-Go-Round, based on his own play, followed a year later. Steven's 1962 feature Hero's Island, starring James Mason and Stevens' wife Kate Manx, with Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton in supporting roles, attracted some favorable critical attention with its unusual story, about the fight for possession of an island off the Carolinas in pre-Revolutionary America. During this period, Stevens also entered television production, with the 1962 rodeo-based series Stoney Burke, starring Jack Lord and Bruce Dern, and Outer Limits, a science-fiction anthology series that ran from 1963 thru 1965, achieving a major cult following, resulting in its release on videocassette and laserdisc in the '80s, and a planned revival in the '90s. Stevens later directed and wrote the movie Incubus (1966), worked as supervising producer on the series Battlestar Glactica (1979), and wrote Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991).

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide