'President's Men' Director Dies By Sharon Waxman Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, November 20, 1998; Page F01

He was 70.

Police said the director died after a metal pipe – seven feet long, four inches in diameter – crashed through his windshield and struck him in the head as he was driving on the Long Island Expressway.

He was taken to North Shore Hospital in Plainview, N.Y., and pronounced dead there at 12:22 p.m.

Pakula was an elder in the Hollywood establishment, having worked with the entertainment industry's most talented actors in a career that spanned four decades. But he also had many friends in literary, journalistic and political circles who praised his generosity, his loyalty and his social activism.

"He was funny, witty, enormously perceptive," said painter Polly Kraft, the wife of Washington attorney Lloyd Cutler. "His antennae were all over the place. He was drawn to 'a condition humaine.'"

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, who was depicted by Robert Redford in "All the President's Men," said of the director, "I spent hours and hours with him, just being a reporter and a shrink. He had a way of drawing you out. . . . On the outside he was the essence of mellowness and on the inside he was churning; but he had learned to convert the churning to questions."

Robert Boorstin, Pakula's stepson and a senior official in the Treasury Department, said Pakula was supportive in his efforts to acknowledge and cope with manic-depression. "In most families the parents run, they can't take it. I don't think I could have survived without my stepfather," Boorstin said. "He was there, every day, two, three times a day, when I was going crazy, in the hospital."

Pakula directed 16 films and produced 17, working with more than a generation of the movie industry's top talent, from Meryl Streep in "Sophie's Choice" to Harrison Ford in "Presumed Innocent" to Robert Redford in "All the President's Men" to Julia Roberts in "The Pelican Brief." He earned a reputation for being an "actor's director," helping them flesh out their performances.

William Goldman, the screenwriter of "All the President's Men," called Pakula "one of the last gentlemen in the movie business," while Harry Clein, Pakula's publicist and close friend of 30 years, said, "So much of what I know about film comes from his openness in discussing it with me. A lot of us sat at his feet and learned." Pakula once said that if he had not been a director, he would have been a psychiatrist.

"I am oblique," he told an interviewer. "I think it has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they may not get, as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just a simplistic communication."

Born and raised in New York, Pakula attended Yale University and began his career in the Warner Bros. cartoon department. He moved on to become a production assistant at MGM and Paramount, getting his start as a producer in "Fear Strikes Out" in 1957. He began directing in 1969, with the coming-of-age drama "The Sterile Cuckoo," starring Liza Minnelli.

Critics noted Pakula's best work was distinguished by its tense moodiness and taut narratives. One critic has praised him for "deliberate visual claustrophobia."

In "Klute," in which Donald Sutherland plays a small-town policeman who comes to New York and finds himself involved with a prostitute (Jane Fonda) and a killer, Pakula conjured up a muted and darkened tone. There was a sense that paranoia was drifting through the city like fog. He brought that same feel to "All the President's Men," one of the few good movies ever made about Washington, one that Woodward noted as a rare authentic depiction of the uncertainty and self-doubt involved in investigative journalism. "All the President's Men" took home four Oscars and brought Pakula a nomination as best director. It was one of three nominations he got in his career; he never won.

Perhaps his last important work was "Sophie's Choice," a heart-rending drama starring Streep as a woman whose life was shattered by her Holocaust experience.

In recent years, Pakula tried to regain momentum with more conventional suspense films such as "Presumed Innocent" and "The Pelican Brief." His last film, "The Devil's Own," starring Ford as a New York policeman who finds out that his houseguest, played by Brad Pitt, is a member of the IRA, was not a success.

His most recent passion, according to friends, was an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning novel about the Roosevelt White House by Doris Kearns Goodwin called "No Ordinary Time."

Woodward saw Pakula late last month and asked him about the project. "He said, 'It's too long. If a screenwriter handed this in to me, I would throw it back at him.'"

Pakula was driving a black 1995 Volvo station wagon about 35 miles east of New York City on the Long Island Expressway when the pipe hit his car; he lost control and swerved off the road, said Detective Brian Traynor.

Investigators believe the pipe was in the road before it struck Pakula's car. As of yet they have no information on how it got there or where it came from.

Pakula is survived by his wife, Hannah Boorstin Pakula, a writer, and his stepchildren Robert Boorstin, Louis Boorstin and Anna Boorstin. Pakula was previously married to actress Hope Lange.