Mort Engelberg, who was a producer on films including Smokey and the Bandit and The Big Easy before transitioning into politics as an “advance man” for Bill Clinton and other presidential candidates, died Saturday in Los Angeles of natural causes. He was 86.
“He was a wonderful person, a wonderful husband. He loved the movie business, and he loved his work with President Clinton,” his wife, Helaine Blatt, told The Hollywood Reporter. “He told the best stories of anyone I ever met, the best jokes.”
Born and raised in Memphis, Engelberg graduated from the University of Illinois and then spent a year working on a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. He left school before completing that degree and worked as a journalist for a few years before moving to Washington in 1961 to work for Sargent Shriver, the director of the then-newly formed Peace Corps, and later followed Shriver to the Office of Economic Opportunity, the headquarters of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
But when the Vietnam War began pulling funding away from Johnson’s programs, Engelberg left politics, relocated to New York and landed a job at MGM in 1967. He moved on to United Artists, where he assisted on multiple James Bond films. The studio later transferred him its Los Angeles office, where he worked as assistant to the president of production.
Engelberg eventually moved into a producing role, where he worked on the Smokey films, starring Burt Reynolds, 1986’s The Big Easy, starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin, along with Steve McQueen starrer The Hunter (1980).
His other credits include 1985’s The Heavenly Kid; the 1979 Dom DeLuise comedy ‘Hot Stuff’; 1987’s Maid to Order and Three for the Road; and 1988’s Fright Night Part 2. He was an exec producer on 1988’s Remote Control and There Goes the Neighborhood, which was his last film.
In 1984, he turned to politics in a…
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