Frank Pierson obituary
He was not on the list.
In Sunset Boulevard, William Holden's character remarks: "Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along." Given the difficulties in quantifying their contributions, screenwriters seldom get the recognition they deserve. Frank Pierson, who has died aged 87, wrote the screenplays for 10 films but his reputation rests on Cat Ballou (1965), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), all of which gained him Academy Award nominations, with the last of them winning the Oscar for best original screenplay.
However, most of the plaudits for Dog Day Afternoon went to
Sidney Lumet, the director, and Al Pacino, the star. Pierson, whose work had as
much to do with structure and character as dialogue, shaped the script from a
Life magazine article about a bungled bank robbery that took place on a hot
summer's day in New York in 1972. At first, Pierson found it difficult to write
about the man played by Pacino: "It took me several months before I was
able to conceive of him, because until you have a character whose motivations
you understand, there's no way of writing him consistently."
Much of the film's anti-establishment tone (including the repetition of the countercultural war cry "Attica!", in reference to the 1971 Attica prison riots) and its intensity (it takes place over a single afternoon and evening), derives from the script, as does the humour and complexity of Pacino's character (he attempts the robbery to pay for his gay lover's sex-change operation).
Pierson was born in Chappaqua, New York, the son of Harold Pierson, an entrepreneur, and Louise Randall Pierson, a proto-feminist writer, portrayed by Rosalind Russell in the 1945 film Roughly Speaking, which was based on her autobiography. Pierson served in the army during the second world war, then went to Harvard, where he received a degree in cultural anthropology. Following a spell as entertainment correspondent for Time magazine, he moved to Hollywood, where he wrote 11 episodes (1959-61) of the television horse opera Have Gun – Will Travel. He was soon given a chance to write a movie script. The screenplay of Cat Ballou, written with the more experienced Walter Newman, kept the structure of Roy Chanslor's novel, The Ballad of Cat Ballou, from which the movie was loosely adapted.
Directed by Elliot Silverstein, Cat Ballou was an amusing spoof western starring Jane Fonda, with Lee Marvin in a double role as a murderous hired gun and his twin brother, a grizzled alcoholic old gunfighter who, when informed that his eyes are bloodshot, replies: "You ought to see 'em from my side." Marvin, allowed to exploit his hitherto untapped comic gifts, won the Oscar for best actor. The film started a mode for comic westerns, a genre that had been moribund since the days of Bob Hope.
Pierson was then brought in by Silverstein to doctor the script of The Happening (1967), about a gangster (played by Anthony Quinn) who is kidnapped by hippy beach bums. In the same year, he was co-credited as writer on Cool Hand Luke, with Donn Pearce, who wrote the original novel.
One of the key American films of the period, directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Paul Newman in the title role, Cool Hand Luke was a violent but less dark and more irreverent chaingang movie than most. Particularly memorable was the contest in which Luke eats 50 hardboiled eggs on a bet, and the brutal boxing match between the hero and his nemesis, fellow convict Dragline (George Kennedy), which seems to interpret Luke's masochism as his invincible spirit. Dragline is no one-dimensional brute, and comes to admire his adversary. "That's my darlin' Luke," he says. "He grin like a baby, but he bites like a gator." Another line, delivered to Luke by the prison captain (Strother Martin), proved resonant: "What we've got here is … failure to communicate." Spoken first by a redneck, it has a humorous effect. Newman repeats the line at the film's climax.
Pierson then directed his first feature, The Looking Glass War (1969), based on John le Carré's cold war spy novel. His screenplay, in keeping with the demands of a young audience, changed the novel's hero, a retired, ageing Polish spy, into a young Polish hustler (played by 28-year-old Christopher Jones, a counterculture star at the time), eager to defect to the west so he can live in London with his pregnant girlfriend (Susan George). The ably directed film benefited greatly from a sterling British cast including Ralph Richardson.
Pierson's first collaboration with Lumet was The Anderson Tapes (1971), an intriguing heist movie starring Sean Connery, and arguably the first film to cover the subject of surveillance devices. After the triumph of Dog Day Afternoon, Pierson had the misfortune to be involved with Barbra Streisand and her producer boyfriend Jon Peters on A Star Is Born (1976), the second remake of the 1937 William Wellman movie, with a contemporary soundtrack. This collaboration, on which Pierson was director and fifth screenwriter, was detailed in an article in the Village Voice entitled My Battles with Barbra and Jon, one of the most revelatory behind-the-scenes accounts of film-making. Unfortunately, his battles, mainly with the temperamental star, resulted in a defeat, as the film turned out to be a vanity project, though Streisand was impressive belting out the tunes.
Pierson's third and last film as director was King of the Gypsies (1978), which offered a fascinating glimpse into an exotic folklore. Because he was busy serving as president of the Writers Guild of America (1981-83) and working as a television producer, it was 11 years before he returned to screenwriting with Norman Jewison's In Country (1989), a rather sentimental, meandering tale starring Bruce Willis as a disturbed Vietnam veteran. Pierson managed to maintain the tension in his script for Alan J Pakula's Presumed Innocent (1990), an engrossing thriller based on Scott Turow's bestseller and featuring Harrison Ford.
Pierson, who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2001 to 2005, ended his career on a high as consulting producer on the television series Mad Men.
His first two marriages, to Polly Stokes and Dori Derfner,
ended in divorce. He is survived by Helene, whom he married in 1990, and his
children, Michael and Eve, from his first marriage.
Filmography
Director
Have Gun – Will Travel (1962) (TV series)
Route 66 (1963) (TV series)
The Looking Glass War (1970)
The Neon Ceiling (1971)
Nichols (1971) (TV series)
The Bold Ones: The New Doctors (1973) (TV series)
A Star Is Born (1976)
King of the Gypsies (1978)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985) (TV series)
Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture (1990)
Citizen Cohn (1992)
Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994)
Truman (1995)
Dirty Pictures (2000)
Conspiracy (2001)
Soldier's Girl (2003)
Paradise (2004)
Screenwriter
Have Gun – Will Travel (1962) (TV series)
Naked City (1962–1963)
Route 66 (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Happening (1967)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
The Looking Glass War (1969)
The 42nd Annual Academy Awards (1970)
The Anderson Tapes (1971)
Nichols (1971–1972)
The Bold Ones: The New Doctors (1973)
Amanda Fallon (1973)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
A Star Is Born (1976)
King of the Gypsies (1978)
Haywire (1980)
In Country (1989)
Presumed Innocent (1990)
The Good Wife (2010)
Mad Men (2012)
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