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 World War IImilitary service. Landau co-founded National Telefilm Associates, a New York-based television distribution company, with Oliver A. Unger and Harold Goldman in 1954 and subsequently became the president and chairman of the board of the company. Among NTA's holdings were various television stations in the United States, including Channel 13 in Newark, N.J. WNTA-TV, whose pioneering programming included award-winning shows such as Play of the Week,Open End, and The Mike Wallace Interviews. Landau won a Peabody Award for The Play of the Week, a series of stage plays mounted for television from 1959 to 1961. NTA, 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 1961, Landau and Unger turned to feature-film production, forming the Landau-Unger Company, which produced films such as The Pawnbroker and Long Day's Journey into Night . The latter, a screen rendering of the play by Eugene O'Neill, was shown at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where its stars won the Best Actress and Actor awards collectively. The Landau-Unger Company also distributed the Eleanor Roosevelt Story, which won the 1965 Academy Award for Best Documentary. The Landau-Unger Company was sold to Commonwealth United Corporation in 1967, at which time he was named president and CEO. Films financed, produced and distributed by Commonwealth United under Landau include The Madwoman of Chaillot, The Magic Christian, Julius Caesar and The Battle of Neretva. In 1970, he compiled and produced the 185-minute television documentary , an account of the public career of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The documentary was praised as achieving a density and shapeliness that would be rare in any movie, let alone a documentary committed to the sequence of actual events. Always interested in adapting theatrical productions to film, he founded the American Film Theatre in 1972 to make movies of distinguished plays.
