Robert Patrick Mulligan (August 23, 1925 – December 20, 2008) was an American director and producer. His dramas include To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Summer of '42 (1971), The Other (1972), Same Time, Next Year (1978), and The Man in the Moon (1991). He collaborated with producer Alan J. Pakula in the 1960s.
Mulligan served in either the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II as a radio operator. At war's end, he graduated from Fordham University, then obtained work in the editorial department of The New York Times, but left to pursue a career in television.
Mulligan began his television career as a messenger boy for CBS television. He worked diligently, and by 1948 was directing major dramatic television shows.
In the early 1950s he directed many episodes of Suspense. He followed this directing for The Philco Television Playhouse, Armstrong Circle Theatre, The Alcoa Hour, The United States Steel Hour, Studio One in Hollywood, Goodyear Playhouse and The Seven Lively Arts.
In 1957 Mulligan directed his first motion picture, Fear Strikes Out, starring Anthony Perkins as tormented baseball player Jimmy Piersall. The film was the first feature he would direct alongside longtime collaborator Alan J. Pakula, who received his first producer credit with the film. Pakula once confessed that "working with Bob set me back in directing several years because I enjoyed working with him, and we were having a good time, and I enjoyed the work."
Mulligan returned to television to direct episodes of Playhouse 90, Rendezvous, The Dupont Show of the Month, and TV versions of Ah, Wilderness! and The Moon and Sixpence. In 1959 he won an Emmy Award for directing The Moon and Sixpence, a television production that was the American small-screen debut of Laurence Olivier.
Mulligan returned to feature films to make two Tony Curtis vehicles, The Rat Race and The Great Imposter. He was going to make a third, The Wine of Youth but it was not made.
Mulligan then made two Rock Hudson vehicles, Come September and The Spiral Road.
In the early 1960s, Pakula returned to Mulligan with the proposition of directing To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee. Mulligan accepted the offer despite the awareness that "the other studios didn't want it because what's it about? It's about a middle-aged lawyer with two kids. There's no romance, no violence (except off-screen). There's no action. What is there? Where's the story?" With the help of a screenplay by Horton Foote as well as the pivotal casting of Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch, the film became a huge hit, and Mulligan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.
Mulligan and Pakula followed To Kill a Mockingbird with five more films. Love With the Proper Stranger (1963), starred Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen. Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) starred McQueen. Inside Daisy Clover (1965) starred Wood. Up the Down Staircase (1967) was based on a humorous novel by Bel Kaufman and starred Sandy Dennis as the schoolteacher Sylvia Barrett. The Stalking Moon (1968), based on a Western novel by T.V. Olsen and reuniting Mulligan and Pakula with Peck, this time in the role of Sam Varner, a scout who attempts to escort a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) and her half-Indian son to New Mexico after they are pursued by a bloodthirsty Apache, the boy's father. After this film, Pakula parted company from Mulligan to pursue his own career in directing.
Mulligan began the 1970s with The Pursuit of Happiness (1971), based on the 1968 novel by Thomas Rogers, which had been a finalist for the National Book Award. The film starred Michael Sarrazin as William Popper, a college student (disillusioned with both right-wing and left-wing American politics) whose life is complicated when he accidentally runs over and kills an elderly woman and is quickly sentenced to one year in prison for vehicular manslaughter. He then contemplates breaking out of prison and fleeing the country with his girlfriend (played by Barbara Hershey), since neither feels their lives have made any significant difference in America.
Also in 1971, Mulligan released Summer of '42 (1971), which was based on the coming-of-age novel by Herman Raucher and starred Gary Grimes as a teenage stand-in for Raucher who spends a summer vacation in 1942 on Nantucket Island lusting after a young woman (Jennifer O'Neill) whose husband has shipped off to fight in the war. A box office smash, Summer of '42 went on to gross over $20 million, and Mulligan was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director.
Summer of '42 was followed by The Other (1972), a thriller film scripted by former Hollywood actor Thomas Tryon from his own book. It told the story of two 9-year-old boys, Niles and Holland Perry (played by real-life twins Chris and Marty Udvarnoky), who get involved in a series of grisly murders at their home on Peaquot Landing in the 1930s. Although the film was not an immediate success at the box office, it has since gone on to gain a steady cult following. In 1973, Mulligan was slated to direct the adaptations of both The Drowning Pool and That Championship Season, before the jobs went to other directors.
In the mid-1970s, Mulligan was briefly engaged in talks with producers Julia and Michael Phillips to direct Taxi Driver (1976), with Jeff Bridges to star as the psychotic Travis Bickle. Objections posed by screenwriter Paul Schrader caused the project to be turned over to Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro instead.
Mulligan proceeded by rounding out the 1970s with three films dominated by performances from A-list Hollywood actors: Jason Miller as a Los Angeles locksmith threatened by hitmen in The Nickel Ride (1974); Richard Gere as an Italian-American youth trying to break from his working-class family in Bloodbrothers (1978); and Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn portraying George and Doris, a pair of long-term adulterers, in Same Time Next Year (1978), based on the play by Bernard Slade.
As the 1980s dawned, Mulligan found work harder to come by, succeeding in directing only two films by the end of the decade.
Mulligan had started directing Rich and Famous for MGM but asked to be replaced after a week of shooting; George Cukor replaced him.
Mulligan was also fired from directing The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper because he allegedly took seven days to shoot a whitewater rapids chase.