Alvin Sargent Dead: Julia and the Ordinary People's Screenwriter, Oscar Winner, Was 92



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His outstanding career also includes "Paper Moon", "The Cuckoo Clock", "What About Bob? and three Spider-Man movies.

Alvin Sargent, the master of adapted screenplay who won the Oscars for Julia and Ordinary people in a fabulous career that made the whole gamut of Ben Casey and The hour Alfred Hitchcock at The amazing spider-man, is dead. He was 92 years old.

Sargent died Thursday of natural causes at home in Seattle, his friend and producer Pam Williams (Lee Daniels & # 39; The Butler) announced. She was a partner of the late wife, Laura Ziskin.

Sargent had a supernatural talent for taking books and plays and transforming them into fun scenarios that come to life on the big screen.

The Philadelphia native won the first of his three Oscar nominations by bringing the 1971 novel by Joe David Brown Addie Pray at theaters like Moon paper (1973), directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Tatum O 'Neal, her 10-year-old star, became the youngest actor to win an Oscar when she was honored for her portrayal of the book's main character.

John Frankenheimer I walk the line (1970), Sargent's adaptation of Madison Jones's 1967 novel An exileGregory Peck told one of his toughest roles. Paul Newman asked the screenwriter to perform Paul Zindel's award-winning work for the Pulitzer Prize The effect of gamma rays on the worries of humans in the moon (1972) on the screen. Newman directed and his wife, Joanne Woodward, played.

His other adaptations included the crime drama Dustin Hoffman Right time (1978), based on an Edward Bunker novel; Nuts, Barbra Streisand's 1987 thriller taken from Tom Topor's play; the star Danny DeVito The money of others, the screen adaptation of a play by Jerry Sterner; and Unfaithful, the remake of Claude Chabrol in 2002 The Unfaithful Woman which featured Richard Gere and Diane Lane.

For 25 years, Sargent was the life partner of producer-writer Ziskin and the couple collaborated on the comedy Bill Murray. What about Bob? (1991) and the drama hero (1992) with Hoffman. They married in 2010, a year before her loss of breast cancer.

The breakthrough of Sargent's career came with one of his first films, an adaptation of John Nichols's 1965 novel The cuckoo sterile (1969).

"I got involved in film because of Alvin Sargent," said David Paul Kirkpatrick, Paramount's former president and producer.The evening star, Grand night) wrote in a tribute of 2011. "I remember seeing[[[[Sterile cuckoo]as a teenager and trembling, largely because of a scene of "tomato peels" that lasted 10 minutes between the first romantic [Liza Minnelli, who would receive an Oscar nomination for her work, and Wendell Burton].

"The story was about university romance in New England, filled with sexual tensions that finally erupted into this sad and humanistic humorous scene of a first love affair.After a kinetic series of cuts in the first half of movie, the stage … plays in a [almost] continuous master. "

Julia (1977), the Holocaust drama starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave was based on the personal writings of Lillian Hellman. Best winner Ordinary people (1980), the heartbreaking look at a family falling apart after a tragedy, was adapted from a novel by Judith Guest.

J.J. Abrams often quotes Ordinary people, which featured Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, as inspiration for the years 1991 About Henry, the scenario that started his career.

"I realize that the blank page is a magic box, you know, it must be filled with something fantastic," Abrams said in 2007. "I had the habit of having the Ordinary people script that I flip through. The romance was incredible for me; it would inspire me. I wanted to try to fill the pages with the same kind of mind, thought and emotion as this script. "

Kirkpatrick said that one of his most cherished memories as a young filmmaker read a first version of Sargent's script for Bobby Deerfield (1977). According to the 1961 novel by Erich Maria Remarque The sky does not have any favorites, tells the story of an American pilot (Al Pacino) who finds success on the European circuit while falling in love with a Belgian terminally ill (Marthe Keller).

"I was standing in the office of Ray Wagner, who was MGM's production manager at the time," wrote Kirkpatrick. "I will never forget Wagner who talks about the beauty of an original screenplay by Alvin Sargent that the studio was planning to read.He called Sargent" the prince of soft writing ". "

At the end of his career, Sargent took up a unique challenge: adapting the story of Steve Lee's Stan Lee and Spider-Man. He wrote the scenarios for Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), both featuring Tobey Maguire as web-slinger, and rewrote the The amazing spider-man (2012), starring Andrew Garfield in the title role. For the latter, he shared scriptwriting credit with James Vanderbilt and Steve Kloves.

Sargent's efforts have been widely praised for capturing the nuances of the character who made the Marvel comic book so popular.

"Now, that's what a superhero movie should be," wrote Roger Ebert in his 2004 film review. "Spider-Man 2 believes in its story in the same way as serious comic book readers, when the adventures of the page express their own dreams and wishes. This is not a camp nor a nostalgia, it is not special effects from one wall to another, and it is not marinated in anxiety. It's simply and poignantly realizing that being Spider-Man is a burden that Peter Parker is not quite ready to endure. "

Alvin Supowitz was born on April 12, 1927. His older brother, Herb, was a writer and television producer, known for his work on Tonight's show and Saturday Night Live (He died in 2005). Their father was a livestock feed vendor who committed suicide in his early 40s.

Sargent attended Upper Darby High School outside Philadelphia, but gave up during the Second World War to join the US Navy. As he revealed during an interview with the Writers Guild Foundation in 2008, Sargent had decided to take the initiative to ensure that he would graduate. "If you leave high school during the war and your grades are not very good and you do not even get a degree, they graduate," he said.

During his service, Sargent learned a technique that would have led to his famous career: typing. "I never imagined myself to be a screenwriter, an author, or even an author – I never had a plan," he said. "I learned to type in. It was one of my skills.After I left, I got a job to make a living.But my passion was typing."

After the war, Sargent moved to Los Angeles and waited for tables, handed over to a clothing company and transported accessories for CBS. He briefly attended UCLA and then decided to give a dramatic twist by joining The Circle Theater, a theater troupe composed of William Schallert, Jerry Epstein, Kathleen Freeman and Sydney Earl Chaplin, son of Charlie Chaplin.

(Sargent recalled having appeared in a production of Rain who played Jun Havoc. His brother was working on the rain machine and Charlie Chaplin was the director.)

He then started selling ads for Variety. One day, Sargent received a phone call from casting director Maxwell Arnow, who wanted him to play a soldier. From here until eternity (1953). He had a few days off, flew to Hawaii and appeared as Nair in the winning film for best film directed by Fred Zinnemann. (More than two decades later, Zinnemann would lead Julia, First Oscar of Sargent.)

Sargent worked as an advertising salesman for the next seven years while writing in his spare time. "I started writing a dialogue," he said. "People are talking to each other, that's how I called him."

Through a friend, his work was given to an agent who entrusted Sargent with a position as a history writer on the ABC series of 1961-1962. Bus stop. It did not take him long to realize that he knew nothing of the story editor job and he was fired. But over the course of the year, he won another job by revising a Ben Casey script after the departure of the original writer for Christmas.

Sargent then made a career in drama television, writing screenplays for Naked city, Empire, Road 66, Mr Novak and Save who can. In 1964, he wrote "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow", a memorable episode of The hour Alfred Hitchcock who saw the main character (Patricia Collinge) and her cat locked in a safe by the niece's fiancé.

Sargent credited Naked city producers Leo Davis and Herbert Leonard, among others, for helping him grow up. "These guys were fantastic," he said in his chat about the Writers Guild Foundation. "They worked with you, and you really learned how to put things together."

Sargent graduated in 1966 with Gambit, a breeze caper comedy starring Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine, and he then wrote other films like Dominick and Eugene (1988), White Palace (1990), False (1996) and No matter where but here (1999).

Sargent married from 1953 to 1974 with actress Joan Camden (Fight with O.K. Corral). She died in 2000. They had two daughters, Amanda and Jennifer. The survivors also include his daughter-in-law, Julia; grandchildren Anna, Olivia, Lillian and Oliver; and a great-grandson, Lawrence.

He was quoted as saying, "When I die, I will have written on my headstone," Finally a plot. "

A memorial service will be held in Los Angeles at a date to be announced. In lieu of flowers, the family is requesting contributions to Stand Up to Cancer, co-founded by Ziskin in 2008.

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