Writer, director and producer Frank Pierson has died at the age of 87. Best known as the screenwriter of (pictured) - the coolest prison drama ever made, and giddy east coast counter-culture true life heist drama starring - Pierson was one of American film and television's most anarchic and influential creatives. His legacy can be held up against that of radical US screenwriters Paddy Chayefsky (Network, The Hospital) and David Rayfiel (Death Watch, Valdez Is Coming).
Having served in the military during World War II and then graduated from Harvard, Pierson worked as a journalist and correspondent for Time and Life magazines before getting his break script editing and writing television series Have Gun, Will Travel, Naked City and Route 66. Lacking the ego and glory hunting ethos of many of his peers, Pierson always believed in the strength of collaboration as his co-writer film credits Cat Ballou (with Walter Newman) and Cool Hand Luke (with Donn Pearce) bear out. It is, however, for his solo screenplay of Dog Day Afternoon that he is best known. Based on a real-life bank heist in Brooklyn - Pierson penned the famous moment when Pacino shouted "Attica!" outside the bank in reference to the Attica prison riot in New York State in 1971. Directed by , the film artfully skewered a sense of political and cultural unrest that was sweeping across America as the hippy dream faded.
Pierson was also a director of some note. He directed and in the remake of and he also had many fruitful collaborations with actor James Woods including Roy Cohn biopic Citizen Cohn and Dirty Pictures, the true life account of the Cincinnati museum director who was put on trial in 1990 for exhibiting sadomasochistic photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Like many of his contemporaries, Pierson had more recently found great satisfaction working in television and had worked as a writer and consulting producer on Mad Men and The Good Wife. Having done three seasons on Mad Men, Pierson had been expected to return for the show's new season next year. To the end he was an unstoppable force. Like Paul Newman's laconic chain gang Christ figure in Cool Hand Luke, Frank Pierson was "a natural-born world-shaker.”
Frank Pierson 12 May, 1925 – 23 July 2012
