Robert Klane, a comic novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker "with a taste for gleeful vulgarity who wrote the screenplay for Weekend at Bernie's, the 1989 cult film about two young insurance company employees who create the illusion that their murdered boss is still alive," died August 29, the New York Times reported. He was 81.
Klane's writing career began with the publication of two novels: The Horse Is Dead: A Tasteless Novel (1968) and Where's Poppa? (1970), the latter of which was adapted into the screenplay for a comedy film about a single lawyer (George Segal) who dreams of scaring to death or institutionalizing his aged, maddening mother (Ruth Gordon).
Weekend at Bernie's director Ted Kotcheff wrote in his memoir Director's Cut: My Life in Film (2017) that Klane had been inspired to write the movie by his time as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s, when the top executives at one of the agencies where he worked invited employees to their beach houses on Long Island. "But he always wondered what would happen if the underlings got a house all to themselves--inmates taking over the asylum," Kotcheff noted.
After working for two agencies as a copywriter, Klane joined production house Filmex in 1967 where he directed commercials. In his spare time he wrote The Horse Is Dead, about a camp counselor who hates his campers. The Times noted that the book "was labeled 'filth and smut simply for the sake of smut' by a self-appointed decent literature committee that wanted it removed from a library in Bel Air, Md., in 1968. But commissioners in Harford County, Md., refused to ban it. On the other hand, Jack Benny sent Mr. Klane a fan letter telling him that it was the funniest book he had ever read."
Two years later, Klane published Where's Poppa?. Carl Reiner directed the film adaptation from a script by the author. Over the next three decades, Klane continued writing for TV and film, including six episodes of M*A*S*H and the 1985 movie National Lampoon's European Vacation. His directing work included Thank God It's Friday (1978) and The Odd Couple: Together Again (1993).