Writer shaped lives of generation
Print Edition
THE young press agent asked the famously cynical Oscar-winning actor what he thought was the key to success in Hollywood. “Survival,” replied Humphrey Bogart. “Stick around long enough and everybody else will die or retire.”
That press agent, Stirling Silliphant, became a screenwriter. Not only did he survive, he also had a hand in writing memorable films and TV shows that entertained the baby boom generation.
He ended up with an Academy Award, for the screenplay for 1967’s “In the Heat of the Night,” winner of the best-picture Oscar.
“Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God” is that rare book about the movies and television that focuses on a person who writes the scripts. Author Nat Segaloff fills the pages of Silliphant’s biography with entertaining recollections from the natural-born storyteller. There are lots of lessons, too, about writing for the screen.
God-like fingers were needed to maintain Silliphant’s pace. In the last four years of the 1950s, he wrote 68 TV episodes for series such as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Perry Mason,” and found time for five movies.
Silliphant met with Hitchcock only once. In that hour, however, the master of suspense described shot after shot, providing camera movements and everything else a particular episode required except the lines the characters would speak. For that, Hitchcock would hold his thumb and forefinger an inch or two apart and say, “Give me about this much.”
Silliphant (1918-1996) showed his successful formula in describing his leading characters: “In their conflict they exposed their own fears, and therefore their humanity. And as this impacted on the several other characters, we inevitably had to see them as facets of ourselves.”
His own disasters — failed projects, failed marriages, a murdered son, terminal cancer — suggest why writers like to write: They exercise some control over their make-believe worlds.
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