\n\tAlan Trustman, who wrote the screenplays for The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, back-to-back 1968 films that starred Steve McQueen in two of his most memorable roles, has died. He was 95.<\/p>\n
\n\tTrustman died Feb. 5 in a Miami nursing home, his son, John Trustman, told<\/a> The New York Times.<\/p>\n \n\tTrustman also co-wrote They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), the crime drama that was directed by Gordon Douglas and starred Sidney Poitier<\/a> as police detective Virgil Tibbs in the sequel to the Oscar best picture winner In the Heat of the Night (1967).<\/p>\n \n\tTrustman was working as a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer at a large law firm in Boston in 1967 when he acted on an idea to write a film about a bank heist. \u201cI knew I could never write a book. But maybe I could write a movie,\u201d he told<\/a> author John Spooner years ago.<\/p>\n \n\tThrough his college connections, Trustman found the name of a New York literary agent and pitched him his story, and it wound up becoming The Thomas Crown Affair. Directed by Norman Jewison<\/a> and produced by Walter Mirisch<\/a>, the movie shot primarily in Boston and starred McQueen as the dashing millionaire title character and Faye Dunaway as insurance investigator Vicki Anderson.<\/p>\n \n\tFive months after The Thomas Crown Affair premiered, Bullitt hit theaters, with Trustman and Harry Kleiner receiving screenplay credit for their adaptation of a 1963 novel by Robert L. Fish.<\/p>\n \n\tIt was Trustman who suggested that Englishman Peter Yates make his U.S. directing debut on the thriller that features McQueen as San Francisco cop Frank Bullitt and one of the great car chases in cinema<\/a>. (Trustman had admired Yates\u2019 work on a chase scene in the 1967 film Robbery.)<\/p>\n \n\tBorn on Dec. 16, 1930, in Brookline, Massachusetts, Alan Robert Trustman attended the Boston Latin School and The Phillips Exeter Academy and got a summer job at the First National Bank of Boston at age 15.<\/p>\n \n\tHe graduated from Harvard in 1952 and Harvard Law School in 1955 and eventually went to work for the Boston law firm Nutter McClennen & Fish, where his father, Benjamin A. Trustman, was a partner. (His dad would serve as a director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.)<\/p>\n \n\tTrustman told Spooner that he pursued a career in the movies out of the boredom that resulted when his favorite NFL player, New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, retired. \u201cSuddenly, I have nothing to do on Sunday afternoons,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019ve had an idea for a long time about how to rob the First National Bank of Boston.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe convinced Jewison to make the movie after taking him on a tour of the bank and showing him just how a robbery would work.<\/p>\n \n\tIn a 2014 interview<\/a>, Trustman said he \u201coriginally wrote Bullitt for New York City. But when producers Philip D\u2019Antoni<\/a> and Robert Relyea and McQueen wanted to shift it to San Francisco, I was ecstatic. I told them that back in the summer of 1954, I had worked there at the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro and was familiar with the city.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI learned that when you drove a light car like a Ford downhill in San Francisco, as we often did at 2 a.m., it would take off and fly through the air as you crossed some of the intersections. When we were discussing Bullitt, I suggested a Mustang, which was still quite a new car model in 1968. Steve was ecstatic. He couldn\u2019t wait to try it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTrustman retired from the law after Bullitt and was handpicked by Mirisch to write They Call Me Mr. Tibbs. He also was hired for the McQueen-starring Le Mans (1971) but got into a disagreement with the actor and was replaced by Kleiner.<\/p>\n \n\tHe then co-wrote the screenplays for Lady Ice (1973), starring Donald Sutherland<\/a> and Jennifer O\u2019Neill, and Hit! (1973), starring Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor<\/a>; wrote on two 1976 films, Crime and Passion and The Next Man; was a executive producer on The Tracker (1988); and adapted a Raymond Chandler story for a 1995 episode of the Showtime anthology series Fallen Angels.<\/p>\n \n\tHe also wrote novels, taught screenwriting at Harvard, NYU and the University of Miami and traded currency.<\/p>\n \n\tIn addition to his son, survivors include his fourth wife, Barbara, a psychiatrist whom he married in 2008; his daughter, Laurie; his sister, Patty; and 11 grandchildren. His third wife was Playboy magazine cartoons editor Michelle Urry; they were married from 1989 until her death in 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alan Trustman, who wrote the screenplays for The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, back-to-back 1968 films that starred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60,14767,80004],"class_list":["post-333329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-obituaries","tag-richard-pryor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}