Remembrances of Frank Pierson, Creator of \'Cool Hand Luke\' and \'Dog Day Afternoon\'

By THE EDITORS

Frank Pierson, whose scripts included “Cool Hand Luke” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. His influence extended beyond those and other scripts: he was a director, a mentor, a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America, West. Recently, he was working as a consulting producer on two of the more celebrated current TV series “Mad Men” and “The Good Wife.”

What follows are a variety of remembrances of Mr. Pierson.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” a show that Mr. Pierson worked on in the last years of his life (as told to Bill Carter):

In the course of talking in my office, he made it clear he wanted to write on the show. I told him, “First of all, I can't rewrite you,” which is really a big part of what I do. He said: “Sure you can. I had a TV show. I know what the job is.” I asked him what sh ow that was. He said, “Have Gun Will Travel.” I asked whom he had on that writing staff. He said, “Gene Roddenberry.” I said, “Yeah, he's good.“

I feel lucky I got to learn from his bio. Sometimes we put it right in the show. Last year, we had a story where Sally Draper was talking to her step-grandmother and telling her she was so strict. Frank had told me a story his mother used to tell: how when she was a little girl, she was walking across the living room one day and her father was asleep on the couch and out of nowhere he kicked her and sent her all the way across the room and under a piece of furniture and said to her: “That's for nothing. So look out.” I turned to him and I was like, “Can I have that?” A writer reacts to stories like that. And Frank said: “Make it yours. I don't want it anymore.”

He had a real understanding for the adult marketplace that had kind of drifted away from the movie theater. Like any great writer, he had tremendous confidence in his subconscious. There is so much of him in “Dog Day Afternoon” and of him and his brother in “Cool Hand Luke.” When you learn about those things you're like, “How do I do that?”

Robert King, the creator of “The Good Wife,” a show Mr. Pierson worked in 2010 (as told to Bill Carter).

We don't live in a time of Shakespeare or Walt Whitman. In the screenwriting world you've got Robert Towne, Alvin Sargent and Frank Pierson. Those are kind of the Shakespeares. And you think: one of these guys is going to join our writing staff?

The earliest memory I have of my family going to a drive-in was to see “Cat Ballou.” He was extraordinarily clever in that, using the narrative technique of the strolling singers. He saw a way to make a hip Western. With “Dog Day,” it feels like a lot of gritty features and TV came from the grammar of that movie. Frank Pierson created the grammar of the urban crime story in “Dog Day Afternoon.”
You would imagine that one of the top screenwriters ever would talk down to TV, and think it was slumming. Instead he brought a real commitment that you could bring the feature sensibility to television.

Robert Kolker, who teaches at the University of Virginia, and is the author of “A Cinema of Loneliness.”

The death of Frank Pierson has brought the screenwriter out of anonymity, for a moment at least.

Pierson wrote (among other films) “Cat Ballou” (1965), “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), important films made during the so-called “Hollywood renaissance.” Beginning in the 1960s, the major studios began falling apart, their owners dying off or going into retirement, and their studios sold to large corporate entities. It was a period of churn that allowed new talent to enter the scene with films that broke with many of the conventions and restrictions of studio production. “Dog Day Afternoon” was a particularly energetic and imaginative entry into this exciting field. Together with director Sidney Lumet, Pierson created the rare film that remains vital in the cinematic imagination.

Like many other writers and directors of the period, Pierson started in television; but unlike most of his colleagues, he moved easily from film back to television, writing and occasionally directing a variety of programs. He was also active as a producer, as far back as the early 1960s series “Have Gun, Will Travel” and as recently as “Mad Men.” He was something of a renaissance man of the Hollywood renaissance.

Howard A. Rodman, vice president, Writers Guild of America, West, and professor at the  School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California.

Frank's screenplays were impeccably crafted. But the craft was never at the expense of wild, uncontaina ble character. His people were, moment-to-moment, surprising; but their actions, in retrospect, seemed inevitable. This is harder to do than it seems and Frank was a master at it.

Frank himself could have stepped out of a Pierson screenplay. (Have you seen many other 87-year-olds tear out of the parking lot of Musso in a top-down Tesla?) He did not suffer fools gladly and had little patience for bad, or even adequate, work. He was not shy about letting you know. But when he smiled, or uttered a grunt of approval, you were on top of the world.

He wasn't elected president of the WGAW, or of AMPAS, because he was slick, or politic, or ingratiating. (At awards ceremonies, he'd look like Paul Bunyan in a tux.) But there was never a room I saw him in - at the Guild, at the Academy, at Sundance, at Musso - where he didn't command immediate and thorough respect. It was his bearing. But more: it was the knowledge that he'd done a lifetime of honest work, and wasn't done y et.

I always knew Frank was not young, but it never crossed my mind, not even vaguely, that he might someday die. He was a force of nature as well as an icon of the cinema. It's hard to imagine him gone: his death is a shock as well as a surprise.