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Jim Thompson’s Lost Hollywood Years
Jim Thompson's Lost Hollywood Years
Early on in Barton Fink, the Coen Brothers' satire of a beleaguered Hollywood screenwriter, John Turturro's title character eagerly arrives in depression-era L.A., only to slip into a slow, alcohol-induced firestorm of creative malcontent. Holed up in an ancient and strangely underpopulated hotel, the New York playwright's soul is gradually snapped in half, pistol-whipped like a junkie-whore by his brutal pimp, the Hollywood dream machine.
So what else is new, right? Despite current Variety headlines, which canonize well-connected hacks and their $2.5 million spec sales, Hollywood screenwriters have always been notorious bottom-feeders, lapping up crumbs from the base of the cinema totem pole. Noble intentions (and art) aside, this was never more true than when Eastern novelists (or as the Hollywood moguls of their day called them, "sissy writers") packed up their Smith-Coronas for a piece of quick change, and dumped their souls into the California sea.
A sad case in point was the brilliant pulp-fiction writer Jim Thompson, whose talent, at least on the surface, seemed born to the screen. A speedy scribe with a distinctly modern vision, Thompson blazed onto the 1950s New York literary scene like an angry comet, completing twelve books in an astounding year and a half. This legendary run of noir classics began with the most frightening first-person account of a pathological killer ever committed to print, The Killer Inside Me (transformed into an insipid 1971 Warner Brothers film starring Stacy Keach), and flamed out with the amazingly reckless A Hell Of A Woman, whose deranged narrator splits into separate personalities in order to cleanse himself of a horrific double-murder.
Wielding words like a baby with a chainsaw, Thompson's books underscored the dark undertones of Cold War America. They found a ready, hungry audience-at least until mainstream paperbacks (and television) captured the public's attention. After the pulp market went south, Lion Books, the publishing house that had nurtured Thompson's bleak vision, collapsed. Adrift at the peak of his powers, the tall, quiet Oklahoman looked to his childhood love, the movies, as a way to sustain himself. And so he decamped for Hollywood, embarking on a course that would eventually echo many of his own characters' fates: swathed in booze and emotional impotence, leading straight to hell.
Unlike some of the more prominent novelists before him, men such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler, Thompson sidestepped the salt mines of a studio contract when fellow maverick and creative genius Stanley Kubrick came calling. Thompson's ear for dialogue, honed from his years as a wildcatter in the West Texas oil fields, had caught the young Kubrick's eye. Approached by Kubrick's producer, James B. Harris, to adapt Lionel White's crime novel Clean Break, Thompson worked in very close partnership with Kubrick to create the screen blueprint for what was to become The Killing. Today, the film stands as a kind of cinematic Rosetta Stone for a new generation of filmmakers who, like Quentin Tarantino, routinely sport a similar, spiraling structure and lots of Thompson tough-guy talk.
The Killing was well received for its taut, ingenious storyline, and nearly forty years after its release, Thompson's script is still sublime. Yet as the sole screenwriter for Kubrick's breakthrough effort, Jim Thompson received only the meager credit of "additional dialogue." Although he would write three screenplays and a novella for the Kubrick-Harris team, The Killing was to be the first in a string of film-world indignities inflicted on Jim Thompson's eager and gentle spirit. Like many novelists before him, the writer came to Hollywood wide-eyed and with good intentions. And in the great tradition of so many East Coast novelists, he laid himself down like a lamb to the slaughter, well-paid for his humiliations along the way.
Some of the blame for Thompson's lost Hollywood years can be placedwithin the writer's own character. The alcoholic and chronically debt-laden Thompson wasn't exactly dumped on Hollywood's doorstep a complete naif: he'd been shaped by sixty years of movie history. Robert Polito's superb biography, Savage Art (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), details how Thompson's conception of Hollywood was derived from a lost era. "Jim Thompson loved the idea of Hollywood," Polito writes, "especially the old Hollywood that endured around such vintage establishments as Musso & Frank's Grill. But he never understood the workings of the film industry, never would be mistaken for an insider." Polito describes a jittery Thompson who was often confused by story meetings. Old-school to the marrow, and content to seal a deal with a highball and a handshake, Thompson was unable to accept Hollywood's screenwriting-by-committee methods.
A County Sheriff's son from rural Oklahoma, Thompson and his family had once operated their own movie theater. Jim had even spent his wedding night inside a Nebraska picture-house. Though fused with horrendous demons from the shadow of his powerful and gregarious father, Big Jim, Thompson's riveting prose was stoked by the same movie machine that eventually destroyed him. Noir flicks like Out Of The Past (1947), Gun Crazy (1950), Detour (1946) and The Big Combo (1955) all featured psychologically troubled antiheroes (many of them downright psychotic), which became a staple of Thompson's fiction. What seems ironic, particularly in the surge of Thompson novels filmed after his death in 1977-The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet, Pop. 1280, A Hell of a Woman, The Kill-Off, The Getaway (remade twice, counting the From Dusk 'Til Dawn ripoff)-is the timid approach Hollywood has taken to his work.
By the time he had moved to L.A., Thompson had already ransacked the dark closets of Hollywood's own past, pushing further in his violent prose than any filmmaker would ever dare. After The Killing, Thompson jumped all the way to the head of Hollywood's class, only to fall fast and hard. Kubrick's Paths of Glory is arguably the finest anti-war film ever made. Although the script's exact authorship is difficult to trace, Thompson was the first writer hired to adapt the World War I novel to film. After a tortured birth to film, Paths of Glory's screenplay was submitted to the Writer's Guild for credit arbitration. The Guild's decision, whereby Thompson received third billing (behind Stanley Kubrick and Calder Willingham) ran roughshod over Thompson's ironclad contract with Kubrick-Harris pictures, which had laid out screen credits in advance of the production. Though not as bitter as his experience on The Killing (Paths Of Glory went on to receive a WGA nomination for best screenplay), Thompson again felt burned by the movies. He could not have known how prescient the title Paths of Glory would be for the film's director, Kubrick, and its star, Kirk Douglas, who both enjoyed enormous wealth and fame. But for Thompson, the film's principal story architect, a much less glamorous fate lay ahead.
Speaking through self-proclaimed "movie whore" Charlie Fox in his short play Speed The Plow, David Mamet wrote that the film business is like beginning a new love affair: "It's full of surprises and you're always getting fucked." Given Mamet's own tortured Hollywood past (a rumored seven back-breaking drafts as screenwriter on The Untouchables) his words beg the question, "Does the Hollywood beast eat up outsiders?" Or do prose stylists who choose to ride the film gravy train get exactly what they deserve?
Clearly the numbing indifference with which an American artist with the scope and breadth of Jim Thompson was met in his final decade was, as one of Thompson's own creations might've mumbled, a raw deal.
Particularly tragic throughout Thompson's Hollywood years was his desire to rekindle his first love, fiction. But seduced by the hungry animal that was series television, which dangled just enough work Thompson's way to keep him reeled in, the glory of his Lion Books period never returned. Thompson had two, perhaps three literary hurrahs in him after Paths of Glory; and interestingly enough they resulted in his three strongest film adaptations: the strange, grim road novel, The Getaway (translated to the screen in 1972 by Sam Peckinpah); The Grifters (adapted by Donald Westlake and filmed by director Stephen Frears in 1990); and Pop. 1280, the venomous tale of a small-town sheriff who tends to his flock in a windblown Southwestern town (filmed as Clean Slate/Coup de Torchon by French director Bertrand Tavernier in 1981).
But in between these three books, Thompson stumbled his way through such forgettable episodictelevision as Tales of Wells Fargo, Mackenzie's Raiders and Man Without A Gun. As he wrote in a letter to his sister:
"At long last I've got my foot firmly in the door of television, and I'd like to put it up the industry's collective butt. Everything I've done so far has been for Ziv Productions, which is polluting the airwaves with a dozen-odd idiots' delights, and is a very low-pay, slave-driving outfit, but by no means the worst."
For Thompson, an ex-Communist party leader and union sympathizer, work of any kind was ennobling. He'd come up in the hard-scrabble world of true-crime reporting and was armed with a fierce degree of professionalism. But for all his efforts to transcend the medium, Jim Thompson knew he was writing schlock. He came to resent his lowly filmland status and his lack of fame, particularly in light of his literary triumphs in the 50s. Gradually, health and family problems (Thompson's only son attempted suicide in 1963) began to chip away at his Hollywood dream. A serious stroke in 1960, and the removal of half his alcohol-ravaged stomach in 1965, left Thompson unable to meet the daily demands of a writer's life which, then as now, meant lots of schmoozing and meetings.
But even if he had been clean and sober, the evidence was already in that studio story departments found Thompson's work too dark and depressing. Nearly all of his published novels had made the rounds as the '60s came to a close. Most found their way to executive desks with readers' notes complaining of few sympathetic characters and repugnant situations the average American would never tolerate.
As the '70s approached and a new guard of film-school grads like Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg seized power, Thompson's self-esteem, in an industry that worships youth and casts middle-aged writers aside, hit rock bottom. Yet like a proud old bull rising for the final goring, Thompson tried to resurrect his Hollywood profile one last time. Fawned over for his tough-guy rep by a stream of young players such as actor (and soon-to-be producer) Tony Bill, Thompson held court in old-style Hollywood fashion. He would beach himself in one of Musso & Frank's dark corner booths and spin his hard-knocks tales of a writer's life on the road. Bill, and a rising young star named Robert Redford, fell under Thompson's spell. Bill's company signed Thompson for ten thousand dollars to write a screenplay based on his novel of oil-riggers and hobos, South of Heaven. Pretty heady and exhilarating, even if Thompson had been in this movie before.
Slated to coproduce and star, Redford flew Bill and the aging writer up to his Utah mountain ranch for story meetings. However when Thompson's violent and off-target first draft was rejected, and after his subsequent Redford-friendly second draft failed to generate any excitement, the players quickly lost interest and drifted on to other flicks. Once again, Thompson, the living legend whom producers revered in name only, couldn't get arrested in Hollywood.
The high-hat that filmdom was giving him was by no means limited to poolside meetings in Beverly Hills. Wooed by French distributor Pierre Rissient, who had convinced a French company to buy the movie rights to Thompson's unfinished White Mother, Black Son, the writer, now suffering from bleeding ulcers along with his previous stroke-induced problems, was flown to Paris to complete the novel. However, his brutal capacity for alcoholic self-abuse quickly reared its ugly head, and after only ten days France said adieu. Rissient's producers felt Thompson's new pages failed to live up to his reputation, and the project was summarily dropped.
As a prose writer, Jim Thompson was radical and adventurous, forever pushing the boundaries of a genre as tightly ordered in its day as today's formulaic Hollywood action flicks are in theirs. Claiming "there are thirty-two ways to write a story and I've used every one of them," Thompson instilled in his pop-culture gun operas a feverish panoply of off-limits emotions. The man simply crushed taboos like no crime writer anywhere ever has. Forget Chandler or Hammett or Leonard; Thompson pushed his gifts far beyond commercial considerations into the realm of pure experimental art. Every time he sat down to write, he sliced open his wrists and bled straight onto the page.
But the bitter payoff of his creativity hewed so very close to his own characters' fates that fame forever darted off like a frightened squirrel during Thompson's life. In his declining years, his spirit was broken not once but twice by the great raging moviemaking machine over which he had come to obsess. Most of the Hollywood people who approached him meant well; they were drawn to his novels for exactly those qualities missing from their own films: unrelenting honesty and a frighteningly naked emotional power. Still, for all their lip-service, producers could never figure out how to get Jim Thompson's fire on screen.
The twin straws of humiliation that broke Thompson's back began in late 1970, when his novel The Getaway found its way into the hands of Steve McQueen, at the time a solid action-hero draw. The book's intermediary was a powerful young agent named Mike Medavoy, who would later go on to run United Artists and Tri-Star Pictures. At first, McQueen and his producer approached a young Peter Bogdonavich to direct, but Bogdanavich dropped out to shoot What's Up Doc? instead. Then they lined up a far better choice: Sam Peckinpah, the toughest of the tough-guy directors still alive in Hollywood. This pleased Thompson to no end. Like a long-neglected violin that has been freshly tuned, the writer eagerly committed to writing a script based on his novel. Urged by all involved to be letter-faithful to the book, Thompson slaved on The Getaway adaptation for over four months, including a prose treatment, a first draft, and alternate scenes and episodes. However, when McQueen and his producer got a look at the final segment of the script where, as in the book, on-the-lam Doc McCoy and his wife descend into a nightmarish physical and spiritual hell south of the border, Thompson was immediately fired from the project.
Replaced by a young Walter Hill, who would later excel as an action director, Thompson received no screen credit at all and decided to take action. He appealed Hill's solo credit to the Writer's Guild Arbitration Committee, but without success. To Thompson, the blow was especially harsh coming from Peckinpah, who was cut from the same mold as the book's creator, a hard-drinking, hard-boiled product of hard times spent in the real world. Though he knew of The Getaway years before becoming involved with the film, Peckinpah still canned Thompson's script for its debasing final act. Had Peckinpah gone soft? Well, the aging director had to keep his star (and his star's wife and costar Ali McGraw) appeased, while all Thompson had to do was fulfill his contract in a timely manner. You decide.
Salvo number two had already been fired at Thompson as a result of Robert Redford's involvement with South of Heaven two years earlier, but Columbia Pictures was about to escalate that glancing blow into a full-scale assault. In 1975, two years before Thompson's death, Universal Studios came calling with a solid, high-end offer to purchase the movie rights to his hobo novel. But instead of a fat payoff, which Thompson dearly needed to pay his medical bills, the writer learned that Columbia (the studio which had initially ponied up money to Bill and Redford to adapt Thompson's novel) was insisting on ownership rights. All signs pointed to Bill and his production company having bamboozled Thompson into signing a contract that would allow Bill's company to reassign the book's rights. In other words, Thompson no longer owned his novel, and that meant Universal's offer was moot.
Preparing for war, Thompson mustered his forces: his lawyer nephew filed a complaint in Superior Court against Tony Bill and Columbia Pictures. To reassign the rights to South of Heaven, Bill's company had paid Thompson the token sum of ten dollars, or "consideration," a practice common in the movie business whereby the parties involved show good faith in their intentions and allow a minimum amount of money to change hands to bind the agreement under law. For the last and most hurtful time, Thompson was convinced he'd been blindsided by the Hollywood elite. He even suspected, and hinted as much in the complaint, that he was drunk at the time of the contract signing and had no recollection of what he'd done.
Whether Thompson understood the snake-charming ways of high-stakes movie production or not, the lawsuit, and Columbia's claim of ownership, were the final nails in a coffin already fully built. As Thompson's daughter Sharon recounts in Savage Art, "To this day I think that what happened with South of Heaven was partially to blame for his death. That really was the beginning of the end for my father."
The end for Jim Thompson came on the eve of Good Friday, 1977, with Alberta, his devoted muse and wife of forty-six years at his side. Living in virtual obscurity from the film community that had shunned him, Thompson died in his cramped Hollywood apartment, steps from the inglorious "Walk of Fame" that refused him entry. Only a handful of mourners attended the memorial service on Monday. None of the producers, directors, actors, agents or writers who had championed Jim Thompson's bold American vision bothered to show.
Thompson's loyal editor and great friend, Arnold Hano, who had shepherded his work at Lion Books, was there, and he was dismayed by the poor turnout. As on so many occasions throughout the writer's strange and eventful life, the final service resembled a chapter from one of his own novels. "It was just another Jim Thompson story," Hano is quoted in the final pages of Polito's biography. A chronically ill alcoholic who had drifted in and out of jobs all his life dies a slow, obscure death, without any of his peers flicking so much as an eyelash.
But Jim Thompson's stories always had a blacker-than-night kicker. In this case, thirteen years after he was buried, that same dead scribbler was "rediscovered" as a uniquely American writer bursting with an uncompromising talent and vision that had somehow escaped the world for nearly half a century. Hollywood, traditionally more resistant to risk than any other popular art form for fear of alienating its audience, had finally caught up with Jim Thompson. Prophetically sniffing the winds of good fortune that would someday utter his name, Thompson's dying instructions to his wife had been to watch over all his papers and effects because he was sure he'd be famous within ten years or so after his death. Big Jim's son couldn't have scripted a more cynical denouement.
Did Hollywood really kill Jim Thompson the way, some insist, it wrecked Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Chandler? Not completely. The freight-train of self-destruction, alcohol, undid many of the great prose-men who chased the money west. So it was that booze, and a complex, seething cauldron of family turmoil dating back to his own father, eventually took Thompson out. But no other novelist, before or since his death, was appropriated and exploited by the great dream factory as was the gentlemanly son of Andarko, Oklahoma. Plow through Jim Thompson's books, novellas, screenplays, true-crime reportage and even his college essays, and you can find enough bad blood and imploded anger to light up a Hollywood premiere.
But if you go looking for the man's true spirit, an epitaph to cap off a frustrating but at times brilliant career, you need only turn to Jim Thompson's final days. Bedridden in his tiny apartment above Hollywood Boulevard, wracked by a series of devastating strokes that debilitated both his motor and oral skills, Thompson knew he could no longer write or even spit out the words in his head. And so, whispering to his wife that a life without words was no life at all, Thompson simply stopped eating. Until he passed away. MM
David Geffner is an L.A.-based writer/director.
He spends most of his free time cruising the South Bay and wishing
he were James Ellroy.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by clancy Sigal on 11/01/07 at 11:12 am
Nice piece by David Geffner. Possibly due to his own experience he makes the ancient mistake of believing that Hollywood crushes literary talent. I rise in qualified defense. It has to do with making a living not nourishing creativity. Thompson would have lived better battling Gold Seal for an extra $l0 all his life?
Clancy Sigal
This story was published in the December 1996 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Savage Life / Jim Thompson's Lost Hollywood Years
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