Written Interview: Frank Pierson

Today’s written interview from WGA.org is with one of the great veteran Hollywood writer Frank Pierson.

Many of you know Frank Pierson’s work as former President of the WGAW or his stint as the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Others of you may know of his remarkable writing resume, starting in the ’50s with television shows such as Have Gun — Will Travel and Playhouse 90, followed by five decades of films like Cat Ballou (Screenplay by Walter Newman and Frank R. Pierson), Dog Day Afternoon (Screenplay by Frank Pierson), A Star Is Born (Screenplay by Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne and Frank Pierson), In Country (Screenplay by Frank Pierson and Cynthia Cidre), and Presumed Innocent (Screenplay by Frank Pierson and Alan J. Pakula).

But odds are, all of you know the famous line he came up with while writing 1967’s Cool Hand Luke (Screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson):

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Although younger, less film-savvy readers might recognize it only as an audio sample on the Guns N’ Roses song, “Civil War,” it’s still one of the most iconic quotes in motion picture history.

Some excerpts:

What’s your creative process?

Sit down at 10 o’clock in the morning and write anything that comes into my head until 12. One of the few things I’ve discovered about writing that seems to work, at least for me, is to form a habit that becomes an addiction so that if you don’t put something down on paper every day, you get really mean and awful with withdrawal symptoms, and your wife and your dog and your kids are going to kick your ass until you get back to it because they can’t bear you in that state of mind.

What’s happening is that your unconscious is writing all the time. It doesn’t stop. In the middle of a dinner party or just playing with the dogs or what have you, you suddenly have in idea. Sometimes it’s important to go write that down, but it won’t go away. If it’s a good idea, it’ll linger in your mind. If it’s a bad idea, you’ll forget it.

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Cat Ballou was your first film script. It was also very different from everything else you’ve ever done, given its comedic tone. How did that come to you?

Harold Heck, who was the producer, had a contract to do it for Columbia, and he had a start date on it. He was just coming off a string of disastrous pictures and the studio was ready to write the whole thing off. I was working along with John Cassavetes, and Bob Rafelson, and Paul Masursky, and Bob Altman and crowd of other distinguished people at Screen Gems, which was the television of Columbia.

It just so happens that we were all writing pilots scripts, but nobody was buying the pilot scripts, so they brought someone in to run the TV thing. He fired us all and then realized that we all had contracts that were very expensive television-wise, but extremely cheap by the standards of the movies, so what he did was in order to unload the red ink from the books of Screen Gems, he traded us all across the street to Columbia to do rewrites for very cheap rates. Columbia was glad to get us because we were so cheap!

That was the beginning of all of our careers. Cat Ballou was one they were trying to write off, so I was assigned at television rates to do a final rewrite on it. I was the 11th writer on that, but they’d all been trying to do it straight, like a Gene Autry singing movie. Walter Newman, who was the writer on it before me, had the inspiration to do it as a comedy, but he was fed up with the whole damn thing, so he sketched it as a comedy. Then he quit, and that was my opportunity to come in and pick up where Walter left off. He just gave me such a gift because he showed how to do it as a comedy, and all I had to do what follow in his footsteps. It was extraordinary.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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