Alan 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.
Trustman died Feb. 5 in a Miami nursing home, his son, John Trustman, told The New York Times.
Trustman also co-wrote They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), the crime drama that was directed by Gordon Douglas and starred Sidney Poitier as police detective Virgil Tibbs in the sequel to the Oscar best picture winner In the Heat of the Night (1967).
Trustman 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. “I knew I could never write a book. But maybe I could write a movie,” he told author John Spooner years ago.
Through 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 and produced by Walter Mirisch, the movie shot primarily in Boston and starred McQueen as the dashing millionaire title character and Faye Dunaway as insurance investigator Vicki Anderson.
Five 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.
It 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. (Trustman had admired Yates’ work on a chase scene in the 1967 film Robbery.)
Born 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.
He 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.)
Trustman 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. “Suddenly, I have nothing to do on Sunday afternoons,” he said. “But I’ve had an idea for a long time about how to rob the First National Bank of Boston.”
He convinced Jewison to make the movie after taking him on a tour of the bank and showing him just how a robbery would work.
In a 2014 interview, Trustman said he “originally wrote Bullitt for New York City. But when producers Philip D’Antoni 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.
“I 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’t wait to try it.”
Trustman 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.
He then co-wrote the screenplays for Lady Ice (1973), starring Donald Sutherland and Jennifer O’Neill, and Hit! (1973), starring Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor; 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.
He also wrote novels, taught screenwriting at Harvard, NYU and the University of Miami and traded currency.
In 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.