Leslie Stevens

Leslie Stevens IV was a Navy brat. The son of Adm. Leslie Stevens made his mark first on Broadway, where his play, "The Marriage Go-Round", was a hit. He eventually wrote the screenplay for a movie version in 1960. After adapting Gore Vidal's "The Left-Handed Gun" to the screen in 1959, Stevens produced a low-budget melodrama, Private Property (1960), which starred his then-wife Kate Manx and was filmed at his Hollywood Hills home. The movie led to other work. In the early 1960s, Stevens was the head of Daystar Productions, one of the few independent TV production companies to survive amid the majors. Daystar created the Stoney Burke (1962) and The Outer Limits (1963) series. His 1965 movie Incubus (1966), which starred William Shatner and featured dialog spoken in Esperanto, was withdrawn from circulation by Stevens, who never released the movie beyond a few film festival showings. Stevens claimed in interviews that the deaths of two actors from the film made "Incubus" impossible for him to watch. In the 1970s, Stevens went on the payroll at Universal Studios and produced science-fiction series such as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) and Gemini Man (1976). His final movie as a director was Three Kinds of Heat (1987) and, although his output in the 1990s was spotty, he did write a children's film, Gordy (1994).