Wednesday, July 7, 2004 | 8:17 a.m.
Stanley Shpetner's career as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer lasted more than a quarter of a century, and he changed with the times, producing Westerns in the 1950s and '60s, thrillers during the 1970s and dramas in the 1980s.
Shpetner is perhaps best remembered for producing the 1961 John Ford-directed cowboy film "Two Rode Together" and the 1971 paranormal drama "Sweet, Sweet Rachel," the pilot for the short-lived TV series "The Sixth Sense."
Shpetner died June 22 in a local hospital. He was 79. His death was the result of pneumonia, and he had long suffered from Parkinson's disease, his family said. They announced his death over the Independence Day weekend through Palm Mortuary, which is handling the arrangements.
There will be no local services for the Las Vegas resident of 15 years. Services will be July 23 before burial in the family plot in Springfield, Mass.
Shpetner made more than a dozen films between 1958 and 1984, including steamy made-for-TV movies "Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker" and "Secrets of a Mother and Daughter."
"My father liked making two-hour TV movies about provocative subjects such as teenage hitchhiking and rape -- all from the man's point of view," said Patricia Shpetner-Lynch of Austin, Texas. "He picked issues he felt were apropos."
Among those provocative films was a 1981 drama "The Other Victim," which deals with a husband coping with the aftermath of his wife being raped. Also that year he produced "Secrets of a Mother and Daughter," about a widowed woman and her recently divorced daughter who become rivals for the affections of the same man.
Shpetner-Lynch said her father developed an interest in science fiction because of his longtime friendship with screenwriter Richard Matheson. He produced Matheson's supernatural thriller "The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver," which originally aired on NBC in 1977.
Shpetner's debut as both a screenwriter and producer was for the 1958 crime drama "The Bonnie Parker Story," about the female half of the Depression-era, bank-robbing duo of Bonnie and Clyde.
Shpetner's big break came in 1961, in the Western, "Two Rode Together," starring James Stewart and Richard Widmark.
Shpetner was born March 5, 1925, in Springfield, Mass., and he retired to Las Vegas in 1989, five years after making his final film, "City Killer," about a psychotic man who blackmails a woman by demolishing areas of a city until she agrees to date him.
"He retired at that time because he was making a comfortable living off of the residuals from his films, and he was not part of the Hollywood scene," Shpetner-Lynch said. "My father did not go to parties or seek celebrity. Fame was not something that interested him."
In addition to his daughter, Shpetner is survived by a son, Stanley Shpetner of San Anselmo, Calif.; a sister, Norma Levin of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands; and one grandson.
archive
