Ely Landau

Who was Ely Landau?

Ely Abraham Landau was an American producer and production executive best remembered for films of plays in the American Film Theatre series.

Landau started working in television as a director and producer for a number of companies in the late 1940s following WWII military service. Landau won a Peabody Award for Play of the Week a series of stage plays mounted for television from 1959 to 1961 by WNTA-TV in New York. The station was then owned by National Telefilm Associates, a New York-based television distribution company which he organized in 1953; he subsequently became the president and chairman of the board for the company. National Telefilm, which won praise for being innovative, distributed the series, for which Landau was primarily responsible. In a 1959 interview, he said: "With this I'm bucking the trend. But I don't think any independent station is going to succeed if it just does the Westerns and crime and situation comedy shows that we find everywhere else."

In the 1960s, he turned to feature-film production. Landau was the co-producer of Long Day's Journey into Night, a screen rendering of the play by Eugene O'Neill with Ralph Richardson and Katharine Hepburn.