Michael Blake obit

Michael Blake, 69, Writer, Dies; Won Oscar for ‘Dances With Wolves’

He was not on the list.

Michael Blake, who had been washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant when an old friend, Kevin Costner, asked him to adapt his own novel into a screenplay, which became the Oscar-winning script for the Oscar-winning western epic “Dances With Wolves,” died on Saturday in Tucson. He was 69.

The cause was heart failure, Daniel Ostroff, a film producer who was Mr. Blake’s agent and manager, said. Mr. Blake had previously had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and underwent a double bypass surgery in 2004.

Mr. Blake was a classic example of a Hollywood type: someone who works for years to become an overnight sensation. He began writing screenplays in the 1970s while attending film school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met Jim Wilson, who would later produce “Dances With Wolves.” Mr. Blake’s first produced script, “Stacy’s Knights,” a gambling story directed by Mr. Wilson that was one of Mr. Costner’s first starring roles, was released in 1983. For the next several years, though, nothing he wrote made it to the screen.

However, after reading Dee Brown’s history of American Indians and their persecution by the American government, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” he had an idea for a movie about a white American soldier who finds himself alone on the Western frontier and befriends — and is befriended by — the native Sioux, whose way of life he comes to understand and appreciate. Mr. Blake shared the idea with Mr. Costner, to whom he gave credit for what happened next.

“I said, ‘Wouldn’t that make a great movie?’ ” Mr. Blake said in a 1991 interview with The New York Times. “And Kevin said, ‘Don’t you dare write another movie.’ Because I’d written probably 15 screenplays by that time. He said: ‘Write a book. You have a much better chance of reaching somebody with a book.’ He was adamant. He was even shaking his finger at me as I left the house that night. So a couple of weeks later I started writing it.”

The book begins this way:

“Lieutenant Dunbar wasn’t really swallowed. But that was the first word that stuck in his head. Everything was immense. The great, cloudless sky. The rolling ocean of grass. Nothing else, no matter where he put his eyes. No road. No trace of ruts for the big wagon to follow. Just sheer, empty space. He was adrift. It made his heart jump in a strange and profound way.”

ImageThe 1988 novel on which the film was based is estimated to have sold 3.5 million copies.

The 1988 novel on which the film was based is estimated to have sold 3.5 million copies.Credit...Anchor Books

By the time Mr. Blake finished the book — it was published, in paperback only, in 1988 — he had run out of money, lived in his car for a while and moved from Los Angeles to Bisbee, Ariz. He was barely getting by — he had just been fired from his dishwashing job — when Mr. Costner summoned him back to Los Angeles.

The film “Dances With Wolves,” released in 1990, starred Mr. Costner as Dunbar and Mary McDonnell as a white woman who had been adopted by the Sioux after her family was killed and who becomes Dunbar’s love interest.

It was criticized by some who found its treatment of the Indians (virtually all noble) and the American soldiers (virtually all, save Dunbar, sadistic and bigoted) simplistic and sentimental: “Once Dunbar has taken up with the Sioux and starts strutting around with a feather stuck in his hair, the movie teeters on the edge of Boy’s Life literature, that is, on the brink of earnest silliness,” Vincent Canby wrote in The Times. But it was immensely popular and won seven Academy Awards, including those for best picture, best direction (Mr. Costner) and best screenplay based on material from another medium (Mr. Blake).

The novel “Dances With Wolves” has been translated into 22 languages, said Mr. Ostroff, who estimated that it has sold 3.5 million copies.

Michael Lennox Webb was born on July 5, 1945, in Fort Bragg, N.C., where his father, James Webb, was in the Army, and grew up mostly in the San Diego area. He preferred the last name of his mother, Sally Blake, and eventually had his legally changed.

As a young man he joined the Air Force, and at Walker Air Force Base in New Mexico he was assigned to the public information office and began writing for the base newspaper. He attended the University of New Mexico before going to Berkeley.

Mr. Blake’s other novels include “Airman Mortensen” (1991), an autobiographical novel about the Air Force, and “The Holy Road” (2001), a sequel to “Dances With Wolves.”

Mr. Blake, who lived with his family in Sonoita, Ariz., had a first marriage that ended after 21 days, Mr. Ostroff said, either from divorce or annulment. He is survived by his wife, the former Marianne Mortensen, whom he married in 1993; a brother, Daniel Webb; a son, Quanah Valdemar Blake; and two daughters, Monahsetah Dagmar Blake and Lozen Ingefred Blake. The children’s first names are taken from American Indian historical figures; their middle names are Danish, in honor of their mother’s heritage.