Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (18 page)

“He was, in some respects, like a bull in a china shop,” said Silliphant’s agent, Don Kopaloff. “He was Hollywood all the way. Everywhere he went, he had to be first class. There were limos everywhere. And to a lot of the younger executives in Hollywood, and to a lot of the young people who were just starting to come forward — don’t forget, this was the time when the old guard was on its way out and the new guard was coming in — they didn’t take him seriously.”

Said David Forbes, “He was always driven by being bigger and better. He was truly old-time Hollywood in the sense that the show was everything.”

The Allen-Silliphant association worked to both men’s benefits. From Allen, Silliphant won a place as one of Hollywood’s highest-paid writers, but it came at the cost of leaving behind most of the perceptive, character-based projects that had first distinguished him. From Silliphant, Allen gained the respectability of having an Oscar-winning screenwriter working for him.

“Irwin Allen gave Stirling as much credit as he ever gave anybody,” said Don Kopaloff. “Irwin always considered him as a ticket into the society of successful producers and directors, by way of Stirling’s material.”
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“He was one of a kind,” Silliphant appraised. “He was a dear friend. He was often irascible, but never toward me. He was endlessly demanding. He was a perfectionist. He knew filmmaking. He was, for a writer, a superb producer because he made available to you any and every tool money could buy or imagination could create. He had his designers bring models of buildings and rooms and elevator shafts and upside-down ship compartments into my office so that I could write to the specifics of each location. He was available for meetings and conference. He was never late. He worked longer hours than anyone else on his productions. But, yes, he was vain. He could be arrogant because he knew what he wanted, even if what he wanted was sometimes not the best choice. He lacked, I tend to say with regret, the kind of sophisticated taste which would have let him produce a film like
Chariots of Fire
. But then, who knows, he
might
have been able to do that had he chosen. But he was a showman. He loved the circus. He loved prancing horses and gyrating clowns. But be stayed too long at the Fair. He should have gone onward and upward after
The Towering Inferno
 — sought new directions.”

Silliphant did seek new directions after dwelling in the fantasy world of disasters. For years he’d been saying that he thought his best writing had been for
Naked City
. Throughout the 1970s, he returned to the gritty realm of police stories, only now that he was an acclaimed Hollywood writer, he was expected to burnish the genre into gems that would shine on the big screen. The results were mixed, but his efforts were not.