http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/arts/television/leslie-h-martinson-director-who-left-his-mark-on-tv-dies-at-101.html 2016-09-07 03:54:07 Leslie H. Martinson, Director Who Left His Mark on TV, Dies at 101 Mr. Martinson’s long list of credits is a veritable capsule history of prime-time television through the postwar decades and beyond. === Leslie H. Martinson His death was confirmed by his son-in-law, Doug Carner. Mr. Martinson directed a smattering of feature films, many of them long forgotten. Probably the best known is “PT 109” (1963), about the wartime exploits of John F. Kennedy, played by Cliff Robertson. But from the early 1950s through the 1980s, television was his primary medium. TV studios recognized his ability to complete in days what other directors would take weeks to accomplish and kept him steadily employed, in both dramas and comedies. “Long before I had any real awareness of directors and their careers, I knew the name Leslie H. Martinson,” the critic Leonard Maltin said in 2007. “No one who watched television in the 1950s and ’60s could have avoided seeing that name. It was emblazoned on countless TV shows.” Just a partial list includes, from the 1950s, the live drama series “General Electric Theater” and “Chevron Theater,” the sitcom “Topper,” the drama “The Millionaire” and the westerns “The Roy Rogers Show” and “Tales of Wells Fargo.” In the ’60s, he directed episodes of “Surfside 6,” “Maverick,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “The Roaring Twenties,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “No Time for Sergeants,” “Run for Your Life,” “Batman,” “Mister Roberts,” “Mission: Impossible” and “The Green Hornet.” His output in the ’70s included “Ironside,” “Love, American Style,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Room 222,” “Mannix,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Wonder Woman” and “Dallas.” He wound up his television career in the ’80s with, among others, “Eight Is Enough,” “Quincy, M.E.,” “CHiPs,” “Fantasy Island” and “Diff’rent Strokes.” He was in his 80s when he retired. Leslie Herbert Martinson was born in Boston on Jan. 16, 1915, to Lewis Martinson and the former Gertrude Cohen. He studied advertising at Boston University before becoming a reporter for The Boston Evening Transcript. While on a writing assignment in Los Angeles, he decided to remain on the West Coast and jump into an entirely different career. “I looked at the walls of MGM, and said that’s where I want to go,” Mr. Martinson recounted in a television interview in the 1980s. MGM, one of Hollywood’s most powerful studios at the time, hired him in 1936 to work in its production office as a script clerk. He later became a script supervisor. With the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the Army and served in the Pacific, at Guadalcanal and Fiji. Mr. Martinson’s first credit as a director was for the TV series “City Detective” in 1953. His subsequent work on westerns in the 1950s and ’60s was acknowledged in 2006 when he was presented with a Mr. Martinson’s feature film directorial debut was Mr. Martinson was later hired by 20th Century Fox to direct “Batman: The Movie” (1966), a theatrical feature version of the widely popular TV show starring Adam West, which the studio wanted made quickly to cash in on the show’s popularity. Another of his notable projects was the 1978 thriller Mr. Martinson also directed Rosalind Russell in her final film, “Mrs. Pollifax: Spy,” released in 1971, and Ronald Reagan in one of his last acting roles, in a 1964 episode of “Kraft Suspense Theater” titled “A Cruel and Unusual Night.” Two years later, Reagan ran successfully for governor of California. Mr. Martinson was president emeritus of the board of the He is survived by his wife of 60 years, the former Constance Frye, the host of the syndicated television show