R.I.P.: Donald Westlake (1933–2008)
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that novelist and screenwriter Donald Westlake has died while vacationing in Mexico. Westlake was a prolific writer, a three-time Edgar Award winner and Academy Award nominee for his screenplay for the 1990 movie The Grifters:
Westlake wrote more than 90 books — mostly on a typewriter. Aside from his own name, he also used several pseudonyms — including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West — in part because people didn’t believe he could write so much so quickly.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Several of Westlake’s novels have been made into motion pictures, including Point Blank in 1967 with Lee Marvin, The Hot Rock in 1972 with Robert Redford, Cops and Robbers (1973), The Outfit with Robert Duvall (1973), Bank Shot (1974) with George C. Scott, Why Me? (1990), Payback (1999), a second film made from the first Parker novel, with Mel Gibson, and What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (2001) with Martin Lawrence. Costa-Gavras adapted The Ax for the European screen in 2005, to great critical and public acclaim. Entitled Le Couperet, the film takes place in France and Belgium rather than the novel’s setting of New England.
The novel Jimmy the Kid has been adapted three times: in Italy as Come ti rapisco il pupo (1976), in the U.S. as Jimmy the Kid (1983), and in Germany as Jimmy the Kid (1999).
Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA (1966) was an extremely loose adaptation of “The Jugger.” Neither the film’s producer nor Godard purchased the rights to the novel, so Westlake successfully sued to prevent the film’s commercial distribution in the United States.
Westlake was himself a screenwriter. His script for the 1990 film The Grifters, adapted from the novel by Jim Thompson, was nominated for an Academy Award. (Westlake the screenwriter adapted Jim Thompson’s work in a straightforward manner, but Westlake the humourist satirized Thompson later that year in the Dortmunder novel Drowned Hopes, which features a character named “Tom Jimson” who is hard-boiled to the point of absurdity.) Westlake also wrote the original screenplay The Stepfather, the film of which was sufficiently popular to receive two sequels and a forthcoming remake (projects in which Westlake was not involved).
Godspeed, Donald Westlake.
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