Elliott Kastner | Film producer, 80

Elliott Kastner, 80, a producer whose affinity for literary writers and man's-man movie stars resulted in films like

Harper

,

Where Eagles Dare

,

The Long Goodbye

,

The Missouri Breaks

, and

Equus

, died Wednesday in London, where he had lived and worked for many years. The cause was cancer, stepson Cassian Elwes said.

Mr. Kastner, who began his professional career as a literary agent, was known for drafting accomplished novelists and playwrights into the screenwriting trade. He produced films from novels by Vladimir Nabokov (Laughter in the Dark, 1969) and Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head, 1970).

His first film, Bus Riley's Back in Town (1965), was made from an original screenplay by the playwright William Inge. For his next (produced with Jerry Gershwin, one of his frequent partners), he bought the rights to The Moving Target, a detective novel by Ross Macdonald, and hired an up-and-coming novelist, William Goldman, to write his first solo screenplay. The finished film, Harper, starred Paul Newman.

Mr. Kastner's Where Eagles Dare (1968), a World War II drama starring Richard Burton, was the first screenplay written by the novelist Alistair MacLean. Rancho Deluxe (1975), a comic western starring Jeff Bridges, was the first screenplay by the novelist Thomas McGuane, and the first of three films on which Mr. Kastner collaborated with McGuane. The others were 92 in the Shade and The Missouri Breaks, which starred Marlon Brando as an eccentric killer hired to dispatch a band of cattle rustlers led by Jack Nicholson.

Mr. Kastner made three movies with Brando and five with Richard Burton, including Equus (1977).

In the 1970s, Mr. Kastner also indulged an affection for noir material, producing (with others) adaptations of three of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels: one with Elliott Gould as Marlowe, a contemporary update of The Long Goodbye (1973), and two with Robert Mitchum, Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and The Big Sleep (1978). - N.Y. Times News Service