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The Alan Trustman Affair [Lex]

Most people don’t know the name Alan Trustman. But they do know The Thomas Crown Affair starring Steve McQueen. Alan Trustman wrote that movie, and his story as a screenwriter is at once inspiring and infuriating.

I was friendly with him, and that itself is an inspiring and infuriating story. I had lost touch with him the past few years, but recently my father gave me Alan’s obituary, which he saw in The Boston Globe. Alan died on March 5th at the age of 95.

***
I graduated from Boston University’s film school in 1998 where I concentrated in screenwriting. In the early 2000s, I teamed with another writer to pen a number of scripts which we shopped to Hollywood. Many of our screenplays were Boston-set, of the true-crime or suspense variety.

Though his career as a Hollywood scribe was long since over, Alan Trustman, a Beantown native, was someone you sought out if you wanted to discuss Boston crime stories. I can’t remember how I first got in touch with him, but in the early 2000s we began to correspond by email.

Before the days of doxxing, people were less guarded about protecting their locations, and I frequently noted the signature line of Alan’s emails, which listed his retirement address—a place called Fisher Island in Florida.

Our correspondence petered out, but in 2005 I met a woman who was to become my wife (eventually ex-wife). As the relationship deepened, I was invited by her father to visit him in Florida, Fisher Island to be exact.

Fisher Island is an islet off Miami Beach. You can walk around it in thirty minutes. Not everyone knows everyone on Fisher Island, but when I mentioned to my former father-in-law I had exchanged emails with Alan Trustman, who also lived on the island, it didn’t take long for him to track Alan down.

After that, I would see Alan a couple times per year. Maybe once in Florida and then sometimes when he was back in Brookline/Chestnut Hill for the summer, where my wife’s family lived, as did Trustman when not snow-birding.

At the time, I was still making attempts to sell my own scripts while paying the bills in the family real estate business. Alan’s advice to me was consistently –and bitterly—as follows: forget screenwriting, stick with real estate.

I always listened patiently but was annoyed. ‘You had your time in the sun’ I thought, so why attempt to talk me out of going for it? Why be so negative about a passion people spend many years cultivating?

In one sense he was correct: screenwriting is a tough row to hoe. You’re unlikely to be able to support a family pursuing it. Even if you can grab a little success, you’ll eventually hit a dry spell. I knew this to be true, having many screenwriting friends and acquaintances who were on top of the world after selling something one year and then broke or waiting tables the next. There are only a handful of writers who spend their entire careers living off the income screenwriting provides.

Even so, one can be realistic without being discouraging, and Alan routinely chose the latter. What irked me more was he had put almost no time into developing himself as a writer before rocketing to the top.

***
One of the first lines in Alan’s obituary notes he had nothing to do with the film industry or any kind of creative writing until one night, in his mid-30s, he was so disgusted by a bad movie he saw, he vowed he could do better.

I never got the full story on how his script made it to Hollywood and eventually Steve McQueen, but Alan did work for a prominent law firm and probably a few calls via the old boys network got him access.

It’s a story that is inspiring because we have all been there. We see a movie (or many, many movies) that are horrible and say 'I can do better than that.'
But I was never able to dash something off, make a few phone calls, and leapfrog to the top. I would say Alan’s story is nearly unique in this regard, which is why it’s so frustrating.

According to the obituary, “Although he had never written a line except for contracts and legal briefs, Mr. Trustman spent every Sunday afternoon for two months hammering out a script about a bank heist. When the William Morris Agency quickly sold The Thomas Crown Affair script to United Artists, he felt like Lana Turner, the star who was discovered ‘sipping a malt in a drugstore.’”

Yes, there are discoveries in screenwriting every day. In fact, that’s how it almost always goes. A writer, struggling for years, finally gets his or her script to the right producer or an agent takes a shine to a screenplay and brings it to studios. When the sale is made, the nobody becomes the toast of the town.

Except, with Alan, he did it on his first try. Only a few months into his new endeavor he not only completed a script, but also sold it—a feature that actually got made (when so many get lost in development hell), snagging one of the biggest stars of the day.

I don’t know whether to celebrate an industry that picks winners and losers like this or feel thankful it could happen to anyone, at any time.

Over the years, as I have presumably become wiser, I’ve recognized the Alan Trustman path to success is an indictment of the system, not a cause to celebrate it.

All it really demonstrates is that Alan had a good idea and got that idea to the right person. I doubt the original script he wrote was earth shattering, but it was a good vehicle for McQueen and his agents recognized it. Alan was lucky he wasn’t rewritten and cast aside, but for most this is the rule.

I never understood this about Hollywood. How can you praise something so highly and laud the writer who birthed it but quickly bring in others to redo the work? Clearly you didn’t think the script you proclaimed to be superb was really that. You probably liked the idea and thought it could eventually be worked into a movie, but rather than admit this is how most scripts get selected, you pretend the screenplay and the writer are the finds of the century.

It’s a gestalt everyone in the system is in on, and the system will circle the wagons rather than admit its dishonesty. It’s like listening to professional wrestlers insist matches are not staged.

Part of the trick is Hollywood convincing you they know something more. That they can judge material and potential in a far better way than an outsider can. After 25 years of observing this, I can say with definitiveness, they cannot. If you doubt me look at the amount of movies produced each year. Maybe 10% are good to superior; the rest could have been written by the first 100 people in the Cambridge telephone book (hat tip to William Buckley).

These days, the better writing is to be found in television and independent cinema, but most successful, contemporary feature scribes working toward Hollywood glitter can’t pull off what Alan did. They do put in years before breaking through, but that still doesn’t mean what they produce is beyond the ken of most reasonably intelligent people.

Nevertheless, Alan’s story is a slap in the face to all the people who grinded for years before getting a seat at the table. And it’s even more of a blow to so many talented people who never got a break but possessed similar skills and ideas. Screenwriting success is maybe 20% talent and the rest luck and timing. But few in Tinseltown will cop to this.

***
Why am I going on about Alan Trustman, a relatively minor player in the history of Hollywood? If I hadn’t come to know him personally, I might have nothing to say. But because he had instant success with minimal effort, while at the same time advising me to abandon my own dreams, his passing engendered many conflicting thoughts. Both anger and appreciation for his success, as well as the same for an industry that operates this way. I love movies and have devoted much of my life to the cinema in one form or another, but I hate the process by which many films are developed—and even more the lionization of that process.

I haven’t even discussed Steve McQueen and the movies Trustman wrote for him, The Thomas Crown Affair, and, perhaps, equally noteworthy, Bullitt. They are both solid movies, but I never was a McQueen guy. Nothing against him, but I suppose I’m more of a Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson and The Dirty Dozen fan as opposed to McQueen and The Great Escape.

Alan’s screenplays were also solid. He wrote a few more after he parted ways with McQueen, and his run as a successful screenwriter came to an end in the mid 1970s.

Would Alan have had the same success if he tried to break into the business today. I don’t think Trustman was the kind of high concept scribe every manager and producer is looking for these days. He wrote good screenplays with taut dialogue. They were well-structured and paced.

There really is something to be said for simplicity, and that may be why mainstream American movies are in such dire straights right now. Instead of telling interesting stories with clearly defined dramatic purposes, it’s a race to the bottom for the most surprising hook one can conjure. Either that or another sequel.

Originality is at an all-time low, and so perhaps Hollywood wouldn’t be a fit for a sui generis kind of writer like Alan. Whatever the case, rest in peace, Mr. Trustman. You have inspired and bedeviled me, and that is, perhaps, the mark of any effective writer.