Cool Hand Frank

Screenwriter Frank Pierson presented his 60's classic "Cool Hand Luke" at the Iranian House of Cinema and fielded a question and answer session afterwards on our first evening in Tehran.

"Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand." - Donn Pearce, Cool Hand Luke

If we remember any specific details today about this over 40 year old movie, it is probably Paul Newman's sly,movie star smile, and the egg-eating contest, and Strother Martin's famous line delivered in his high-pitched voice: "What we have here is failure to communicate."

But we may not recall the tender scene when Newman's character's mother, played so beautifully by Jo Van Vleet, comes to visit him at the prison, smoking cigarettes while stretched out in her make-shift bed in the back of her pick-up truck. 

In a lacerating moment of self-revelation, screenwriter Pierson, who adapted the novel for the screen, revealed to his Farsi-speaking audience at the Khaneh Cinema (House of Cinema) in Tehran, that her brutally honest speech about "dogs as bitch mothers who grow completely indifferent to their own brood when they reach a certain age", was something not found in the original novel, but a scene he felt necessary to understanding Luke's existential character, and one he invented for the screen, taken directly from dialogue he recalled having with his own mother growing up.

Frank also revealed that the film grew out of an innocent lunch between director Stuart Rosenberg and producer Gordon Carroll at the old Hollywood restaurant Musso and Frank's. Desperate for a project, after lunch the pair walked down the street to the long gone Pickwick bookstore where, rummaging through the remainder bins, they found a copy of the novel COOL HAND LUKE by Donn Pearce, collecting dust for 19 cents, which they pulled out and bought based solely on its curious title.

They sent the book to Paul Newman and he sent it to Columbia who said "yes" to developing it, and Frank, coming off the success of "Cat Ballou" which he also wrote, was hired to adapt it. The studio probably would have said "yes" if Newman had submitted the phone book to them to develop, given his wild popularity at that time, but even his star power wasn't enough to get them to green-light this dark, subversive portrait of the ultimate anti-hero whose wry and and continual defiance of the "bosses" gets him tortured and ultimately shot dead in the end.

According to Pierson, it took Warner Bros., a studio with a history of making some great "prison" movies, and whose management was more receptive towards a genre they were familiar with, as well as financing from the actor Jack Lemmon, whose company desperately needed a tax shelter and came aboard to produce and finance the film, for this unlikely classic to get made. Then as now, "nobody knows anything", and Columbia had to watch another studio reap the rewards of taking a chance on a picture that seemed to touch the emerging 60's zeitgeist.

Frank told us that one reason that the critics may have been kind to the picture (it grabbed multiple Oscar nominations including winning Best Supporting Actor for George Kennedy and a writing nomination for Pierson) was that the over-the-top but still sexy young gal in the short cotton dress "held together by just one pin" as the leering, barely controllable convicts watch her wash a car with a big sponge and a bucket of sudsy water, just happened to be the daughter of the leading critic for trade magazine Variety at the time the movie came out. Smart move!

It was an inspired piece of casting, but a scene whose very Hollywood and Western depiction of yearning sexual desire, while hardly explicit by today's standards, nonetheless had our Iranian hosts quite glad that the movie was only being shown to a select, hand-picked private audience of filmmakers from the House of Cinema, and not to the public-at-large.

Frank Pierson at the ancient city of Persepolis

Hanging out with Pierson, who will be 84 next month and is a great raconteur with amazing stories from his many decades at the center of the business, was a real treat for me, and for the Iranian audience as well. Surprisingly, they all knew and revered him for his original Oscar-winning screenplay for "Dog Day Afternoon", which, given its transgender subject matter, was just another way in which this trip defied easy stereotyping.

william

Comments

[Diane]

This is way cool! Your blog is like a little gift to me everyday. Taday--big gift :)

[Elsita :)]

Billy, I always learn something new from you.
Thank you!
:)