The Resurrection of Jim Thompson : Thirteen years after his death, the prince of hard-boiled fiction is one of Hollywood’s hottest writers--and screens are sizzling

A curvy bleached blonde falls to her knees, crouching over a man sprawled in a pool of blood. At his side is an open briefcase, with thick wads of blood-stained cash strewn around his body.

Her face clouded with emotion, the blonde leans over and whispers softly in his ear. Then she jerks away, grabbing bloody gobs of bills, stuffing them into the briefcase. As she fills the case, she stares into his eyes, weeping convulsively.

Did she kill him? Did she love him? Or both? And just where did all that cash come from?

Lying on the floor, soaked in blood, John Cusack has another question on his mind. He waits patiently, his back on the cold hardwood floor, until rehearsal is finished. Then he motions to director Stephen Frears, who’s been studying the scene from behind the camera across the room.

Frears wanders over to the young actor, dabbing his toe in the pool of movie blood. “Can you still see the keys?� Cusack asks, worried that a pivotal prop was in view during the scene.

“It’s all been taken care of,� Frears says with an impish grin. “Anyway, you haven’t anything to say about it. Don’t you remember? You’re dead.�

Jim Thompson is dead, too. The dark prince of pulp fiction was 70 when he died in April, 1977 after a hard-luck 45-year writing career that began in 1929 with a tale of oil-field adventures for the Texas Monthly and ended in the mid-’70s with publication of a short novel called “This World, Then the Fireworks.�

Thompson eventually attracted an international cult following and saw one of his books, “The Getaway,� transformed into a 1972 Hollywood hit. But he died nearly broke and largely forgotten, with barely a handful of family and friends at his Westwood Cemetery funeral.

Now, in one of the more wildly improbable rebounds in recent history, Thompson has emerged 13 years after his death as one of the hottest writers in Hollywood.

The curvy blonde and the blood-stained cash belong to “The Grifters,� an adaptation of a 1963 Thompson novel that is one of three new Thompson films completed during the last year. Directed by Frears and starring Cusack, Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening, “The Grifters� is a sexually charged Oedipal thriller set against the seedy nether world of flimflam men.

Hot on its heels is “After Dark, My Sweet,� a love-crossed melodrama directed by James Foley and starring Rachel Ward, Bruce Dern and Jason Patric. A third Thompson adaptation, director Maggie Greenwall’s version of “The Kill-Off,� has been playing the film festival circuit in hopes of attracting a major distributor. (“After Dark, My Sweet� was originally published in 1955, “The Kill-Off� in 1957.)

Most of Thompson’s other books have been optioned. “South of Heaven� is due to begin filming later this year, with the “Rain Man� team of Barry Levinson and Mark Johnson serving as executive producers. Writer-producer John Alan Simon, a longtime Thompson fan, has a distribution and financing deal with Carolco/IVE Pictures for an upcoming film version of “Nothing More Than Murder.�

The incongruity of Thompson’s resurgence in Hollywood, a town indifferent to his talents when he was alive, has not been lost on many of his supporters.

“It’s ironic that people who probably wouldn’t be caught dead with Thompson when he was alive are now busy trying to turn his projects into films,� says Simon. “But the pendulum in public tastes always swings back. We’ve gone through the ‘Rocky’ era, where everybody had to triumph in the end. Maybe we’re ready again for someone who understood the dark side of human nature too.�

Thanks to Berkeley-based Black Lizard Books’ paperback re-issue series of 13 Thompson titles, a raft of Thompson novels have been back in print (a key reason for the recent Random House purchase of Black Lizard was the presence of the Thompson titles). The re-issue series has inspired praise from a legion of literary acolytes who include playwright John Steppling and novelists James Ellroy, Steve Erickson and Barry Gifford.

Horror czar Stephen King has enthused: “My favorite crime novelist--often imitated by never duplicated--is Jim Thompson.�

When playwright Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy� played the South Coast Repertory earlier this year, the play’s program touted Thompson as major “stylistic inspiration� for Korder.

Other fans include Martin Scorsese, Walter Hill, Claude Chabrol, Bruce Willis and Sean Penn, who, when interviewed by Vanity Fair, announced: “I’ve just finished the best book I’ve ever read.� The book? Jim Thompson’s 1952 chiller, “The Killer Inside Me.�

“This whole revival is pretty amazing,� says mystery novelist Donald Westlake, who wrote the film adaptation of “The Grifters.� “I think you’d have to say that it somehow matches Jim’s view of life that he gets his 15 minutes of fame 13 years after his death.�

What really makes Thompson’s surprise cinematic honeymoon so fascinating is the bittersweet saga of his two-decade residence in Hollywood, a tumultuous stay marked by an initial burst of acclaim, long years of bitter failures and one final moment of triumph, which quickly faded, sending him plummeting back into obscurity.

Along the way, Thompson fell in with a cast of characters who now make up a Who’s Who of the Hollywood Elite. They include:

* A young film maker named Stanley Kubrick, who hired Thompson in 1955 to write a script for what became Kubrick’s first movie hit, “The Killing.�

* A fledgling producer named Tony Bill, who befriended the writer in the late 1960s, served as his unofficial chauffeur and introduced him to his superstar pal, Robert Redford.

* A young agent named Mike Medavoy, who at Bill’s urging in 1970, passed a mimeographed copy of “The Getaway� to publicist-turned-producer David Foster, who convinced his former client, Steve McQueen, to star in the movie version, directed by Sam Peckinpah.

* The late actor Sal Mineo, who went to a series of Hells Angels meetings in the mid-1960s with Thompson in hopes of making a movie about the colorful motorcycle gang.

But most of Thompson’s Hollywood efforts ended in failure. Kubrick and his producer, James Harris, commissioned Thompson to write a novel for them in the late 1950s, but when he sent them his only copy of the manuscript, they lost it. After “The Getaway� became a hit, Thompson’s agents tried to interest movie studios in his other books, but without success.

What really happened to Thompson in Hollywood? Was he treated like a king or given the royal flush?

His family sees it from a different perspective. “I think he was taken advantage of in Hollywood,� says his daughter, Sharon Thompson Reed. “A handshake to him was as good as signature on a contract. But his trust wasn’t always returned.�

Thompson’s family and friends describe him as a proud, sensitive man who was hurt, even haunted, by his lack of recognition.

“Jim was a dear man, but he was a depressed fellow with a load of personal problems,� says Knox Burger, a prominent New York literary agent who was his editor in the 1950s and ‘60s. “It’s hard to figure what went wrong out in Hollywood. I think Jim was simply broken at the wheel. He was like a bear. Not a fierce, untamed bear, but the kind you’d see with a chain around its ankle outside a trading store in the Everglades. It was sad.�

Toughest of the tough-guy novelists, Thompson was hard-boiled literature’s icy poet of darkness and damnation. Driven mad by lust and betrayal, his characters are luckless losers adrift in a twilight world populated by psychopaths, blackmailers and corrupt cops. As critic David Thomson put it: “Think of Jim Thompson as one of the finest American writers and the most frightening, the one on best terms with the devil.�

Though soaked with guts and gore, his novels offer surprisingly sophisticated narrative techniques. Thompson’s best books are written in the first person, often featuring a depraved killer as narrator. In “The Kill-Off,� he uses 12 story-tellers to advance the plot. His prose leaves nothing to the imagination.

“There are better writers than Thompson, but no one was more of a visionary,� says novelist Barry Gifford, a longtime Thompson fan who oversaw Black Lizard’s 1985 reissues.

“His characters are so insidious and bizarre--and his scenarios are so outrageous and surreal--that it made him unique as a writer. His stories take the familiar plots you’d see in crime novels and reinvent them in ways that were always strikingly new.�

Novelist James Ellroy is an admirer of Thompson’s movie work. “ ‘The Killing’ really made a huge impression on me,� said Ellroy, who is adapting his own novel, “The Black Dahlia,� for an upcoming film project with James Harris. “Thompson not only writes great dialogue, but he’s great at capturing the psychology of his characters. You get such a strong sense of darkness and loss--it’s the kind of feeling you don’t find in movies anymore.�

Perhaps Steve Erickson captured the jagged intensity of Thompson’s prose best. He concluded an essay in the L.A. Weekly celebrating Thompson by saying: “Read Jim Thompson and carry his hell with you forever.�

Thompson was born in 1906 in Anadarko, Okla. According to Mike McCauley, whose Warner Books biography, “Sleep With the Devil,� is one of two Thompson biographies due out later this year, Thompson spent much of his early life as a wanderer. Based mostly in Oklahoma and West Texas, he worked as a roughneck in the oil fields of Texas, a steeplejack, a bootlegging bellboy, a caddy, collection agent, lumberjack, gambler, burlesque actor, gold buyer, explosives expert and film projectionist.

As his wife, Alberta, who married him in Marysville, Kan. in 1931, recalls: “He’d do anything to support his family.�

A writer even when he was in his teens, he churned out potboilers for magazines like True Detective and Saga, where he was briefly an editor in 1950. He also apparently served as a re-write man at the San Diego Journal, the Los Angeles Mirror and the New York Daily News. During the Depression, he also helped direct the Writers’ Project in Oklahoma for several years in the late 1930s.

In 1942, according to one account, he went to New York and convinced the Modern Age publishing company to loan him a typewriter, paper and $15 a week while he wrote his first novel, a confessional tale called “Now and On Earth.�

His first hard-boiled thriller was 1948’s “Nothing More Than Murder,� published by Harper. It was followed by nearly 30 novels over the next quarter-century, all originally published for such low-budget paperback houses as Lion, Dell, Pyramid, Regency and Fawcett Gold Crest. Thompson made no secret of the fact that he wrote exceedingly fast and often under grave financial duress.

“Jim was always making lousy deals and getting too little money for them,� recalled Bob Goldfarb, his longtime L.A. agent. “It was painfully obvious that he wrote many of them in a weekend just to make a sale. He was always one advance behind with his publishers.�

According to Goldfarb, most publishers paid Thompson a $2,000 advance against a 6% royalty on the first 150,000 copies sold (and 8% on subsequent sales). With most books priced at 25 cents, Thompson needed to sell 135,000 copies just to break even.

“I’m just speculating, but Jim was lucky to sell much more than 100,000 copies of most of his books,� said Goldfarb. “At the rates in those days he’d barely make back his advance.�

Knox Burger admits Thompson was a tough sell. “He was a very grim, disturbing writer who had an almost existential moral view where the good guys never won,� Burger said. “So he was really going against the grain in the paperback world of that day.�

Fortunately, one of Thompson’s fans was Stanley Kubrick, a former Life magazine photographer turned film maker who worked with Thompson in New York on an adaptation of Lionel White’s suspense novel called “Clean Break.� The film noir thriller, made in 1956 as “The Killing,� was a huge critical success, praised for its terse dialogue and striking flashback sequences, two signatures of Thompson’s writing style.

“Stanley had been a big fan of ‘The Killer Inside Me,’ because it had such terrific dialogue, so he really wanted to use Jim on his films,� recalled James B. Harris, who produced many of Kubrick’s early films. “Jim was great with street talk and crime dialogue. So Stanley and I would talk out the structure, then Stanley would tell Jim what scenes he wanted dialogue for and Jim would go off and write it.�

Thompson’s family has vivid memories of Kubrick. “We knew Stanley before he was Stanley Kubrick, the famous film maker,� recalls Sharon Thompson Reed. “He was a hippie when no one had even heard of hippies. He had long hair and funny clothes long before it was popular.�

The collaboration wasn’t always so smooth. “Stanley would come over to the house to work on the script with my father all the time,� said Reed. “But you never knew what might happen. They would have some wild fights over what to do with the script.�

However, when “The Killing� was released in 1956, Thompson only received an “additional dialogue� credit instead of sharing a screenplay adaptation credit.

Harris feels he and Kubrick dealt fairly with Thompson, who moved to Hollywood later that year and went on to share a screenplay credit with Kubrick and Calder Willingham for Kubrick’s next movie, “Paths of Glory.�

“We probably paid him $500 a week writing for us, which was a lot of dough in those days,� Harris said. “He might’ve made $4,000 or $5,000 for a script, which wasn’t bad. Stanley and I only made $5,000 as our salaries for ‘The Killing.’ �

Thompson’s family insists that he got a raw deal. “We all went to the screening of ‘The Killing,’ and when my father saw that dialogue credit he almost fell off his chair,� says Sharon Thompson. “When he saw Stanley, there were fireworks. He was very unhappy.�

According to his family, Thompson took the matter to arbitration at the Writers Guild. However, according to writer-producer John Alan Simon, there is no Writers Guild record of Thompson filing any action.

Simon, who researched Thompson’s life while writing a screen adaptation of “Nothing More Than Murder,� puts it bluntly: “Thompson was devastated. It’s very clear he wrote the script. Kubrick’s contributions were as the director. It’s almost unheard of today for the first writer on an adaptation not to get a screenplay credit.�

Still, the Thompson family acknowledges that Thompson followed Harris and Kubrick to Hollywood where he worked on their next film, “Paths of Glory.� After its release in 1957, the Harris-Kubrick production team commissioned Thompson to write a crime novel, “Lunatic at Large,� with the hopes of generating another film project.

When Thompson completed the book, disaster struck.

“He delivered to us and we lost it,� Harris said. “Stanley and I never copied it, and Jim hadn’t made a carbon. I can’t believe we were so negligent and irresponsible--it’s like losing a great painting.

“Now publishers want me to look for it where I’ve got things in storage at Bekins. Stanley even went down in his cellar and rummaged around. But we still can’t find it.�

In subsequent years, Thompson struggled, writing more crime novels and taking scattered quickie TV assignments, including episodes of “Combat� and “McKenzie’s Raiders.�

“He did TV, but he didn’t like it,� his daughter Sharon says. “There were too many people to make happy. He hated having to please everybody. The way he looked at it, if he pleased one person, someone else would come along who wouldn’t like it.�

In the 1960s, Thompson lived in a small apartment on Whitley Terrace above Hollywood Blvd, located conveniently near Musso & Franks, his favorite watering hole. His friends say he’d often hold court there much of the afternoon and into the night.

Thompson’s wife, Alberta, acknowledges her husband was a heavy drinker. “Sure, he did drink a lot,� she said. “But it never interfered with his ability to write.�

His daughter agreed. “He kept a very rigid writer’s schedule. He’d get up early and write, then have lunch and go back to work. When he’d leave for dinner, then he’d have a drink.�

“Or maybe two,� Alberta Thompson said with a laugh.

At 6 feet 4 and more than 200 pounds, Thompson was physically imposing, “but his personality and physical appearance were paradoxical,� explained Goldfarb. “Here was this big man who was pathologically insecure. He always felt unappreciated.�

David Foster, who produced “The Getaway,� remembers having innumerable meetings with Thompson at Musso & Franks. “We’d sit at the bar,� he recalled. “I’d drink a club soda, he’d have bourbon. He was always broke, but he was a wonderful man. He was just so sensitive--if you’d say hello the wrong way, he’d be hurt.�

Thompson didn’t possess much of the fallen grandeur you associate with aging writers in Hollywood. “He was very different from the people you’d normally meet here,� said Foster. “He was very Southern. And he had this funny way of talking. His teeth would click together, probably because his false teeth didn’t fit so well.�

Tony Bill discovered Thompson when Bill was a graduate student at Stanford in the late ‘60s. Eager to make a film about the American hobo, Bill was researching the topic when someone recommended a Thompson book on the subject. When Bill returned to Los Angeles, he found a Thompson fancier at Cherokee Books on Hollywood Blvd.

“I remember the guy laughing and saying, ‘I wish I could find some of the Thompson’s books. The guy comes in here all the time wanting to buy his books and I can’t sell him any because I can’t find ‘em anywhere.’ �

So Bill did the next best thing--he found Thompson himself, looking him up in the Hollywood phone book.

“He was a really lonely guy,� remembered Bill, who met Thompson about 1969. “I might have been the only friend he had. He was a major alcoholic and he didn’t drive, so I’d take him around town.

“Frankly, he didn’t seem to want to go home at night. So he’d come over to my house. My wife would cook for him, he’d get drunk and we’d drive him home. He was a great storyteller. He could go on for hours talking about history and literature or his adventures as an oil wildcatter and a hobo.�

When Bill realized his pal Robert Redford was interested in making a movie about hoboes, he took Thompson up to Utah to meet him.

“We made a deal with Columbia Pictures to develop an original script about the American hobo,� Bill said. “Jim went right to work on it and his script turned out fairly well, but it never ended up getting made.�

Still, Bill did set in motion the events that led to Thompson’s brief moment of glory. Or as Bill put it: “I must immodestly admit I helped give Jim a second career in Hollywood.�

Pleased by Bill’s interest, Thompson gave the young producer one of his favorite books, “The Getaway.� The novel had been out of print so long Thompson didn’t even have an original paperback, only a Xeroxed copy.

Convinced that it could make a great movie, Bill gave his copy to his agent, Mike Medavoy, then an ambitious young agent at International Famous (a precursor of ICM). Equally impressed, Medavoy shopped the book around, eventually sending it to David Foster, a young publicist turned producer, who showed the book to his old client, Steve McQueen.

“I knew Steve had always wanted to play a real Bogart character--a lovable crook--and when I saw ‘the Getaway’ I said, ‘Wow. This is it!’ � Foster recalled. “Steve was in France, making ‘Le Mans,’ but I sent him the book and I got a wire back saying, ‘Lock it up.’ �

Foster said another one of his young agent pals, Jeff Berg, pushed for a rookie writer, Walter Hill, to write the final script. Berg also proposed the film’s initial director, Peter Bogdonavich, setting up a screening for Foster and McQueen of the young film maker’s upcoming movie, “The Last Picture Show.�

Foster signed Bogdonavich up, but the young director soon departed to do a Barbra Streisand film instead, forcing Foster to sign up his second choice--Sam Peckinpah. Thompson grew increasingly nervous about all this wheeling and dealing. “He was going crazy, saying, ‘Is it getting made or not?’ � Foster recalled. “But he loved the movie. It was a huge hit--it would’ve been a $100-million movie by today’s standards.�

Just how much money Thompson made from the 1972 film is in dispute. Foster--and Thompson’s family--recall him being paid about $25,000. His then-agent, Medavoy, says Thompson made “about 90,000.�

It’s somehow appropriate, by Hollywood standards, that Bill, who had originally championed the project, was mysteriously frozen out of the film.

“I think Tony and my relationship soured after that,� said Medavoy, now chairman of Tri-Star Pictures. “I’m sure Tony felt I should’ve given him the opportunity to make the movie. But I was trying to get Jim some money. The guy looked like he was on his last nickel, so I felt he really needed a break.�

Unfortunately, “The Getaway� was more of a one-shot wonder than a breakthrough for Thompson, a man then in his 60s and in failing health. Medavoy was busy with Hollywood wunderkinds like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Terence Malick and John Milius, men more in sync with the spirit of the era.

“Most of his books weren’t exactly movie properties,� Medavoy recalled. “We were in a period where everyone liked heroics, but Jim’s characters really weren’t the heroic type.�

One of Thompson’s final Hollywood jobs was, of all things, a brief stint as an actor in “Farewell My Lovely.� Knowing Thompson was in ill-health, his former agent-turned producer Jerry Bick gave him a small part in the film playing Charlotte Rampling’s husband to qualify him for Screen Actor’s Guild medical benefits.

A year later, on April 7, 1977, after a series of strokes, Thompson was dead. His funeral, at Westwood Cemetery, was a quiet affair. “It was poorly attended,� remembers his agent, Bob Goldfarb. “It was just Alberta, Jim’s daughters and a couple of old friends.�

Thompson’s family had him cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. “My father was never bitter,� said his daughter, Sharon. “He just didn’t understand why he hadn’t gotten the recognition he felt he deserved. He thought he was a good writer. He just couldn’t figure out why no one else knew it.�

Thompson’s only real champions were in Paris, where the French literary intelligentsia embraced the crime novelist in the early 1970s in much the same way they had celebrated earlier American tough-guy stylists like James M. Cain and Horace McCoy.

According to John Alan Simon, Claude Chabrol was interested in making a Thompson film in the late 1970s but the proposed project fell through. However, in 1981, director Bertrand Tavernier remade “Pop. 1280� as “Coup de Torchon,� which was a huge success in France--and won an Oscar nomination here for best foreign language film.

Then, as the 1980s wore on, dog-eared copies of Black Lizard reprints began floating around Hollywood, attracting a new generation of Thompson admirers.

Maggie Greenwall, who made “The Kill-Off,� discovered Thompson after a clerk in a New York mystery book store gave her “The Killer Inside Me.�

“I stayed up all night reading it,� she says. “I went right back the next day and got two more. You couldn’t help but be struck by how vivid and cinematic his books were.�

Meanwhile, Avenue Pictures’ chairman Cary Brokaw had also realized that Thompson was a hot property. “To show how much interest there’s been, we saw three different Thompson adaptations in a matter of months before we went with ‘After Dark, My Sweet,’ � he explained. “He’s a writer who really lends himself to film.�

So why has Thompson, long neglected and forgotten, become a hot property today? Has Hollywood simply wrung its favorite tough guy icons dry and moved on to a fresh literary kill? Or was he a genuine master of the crime novel--a hard-boiled patron saint finally getting his due?

British director Stephen Frears sees Thompson as indisputably American. “You Americans love that cheap dialogue, wisecracking and talking tough. It’s in your blood.�

“After Dark, My Sweet� director James Foley offers a more complicated theory. “I think we’re catching up with him now because our country is more aware of our dark urges,� he said. “Thompson presents a world that’s not limited to our traditional ideas of good and evil. In fact, whenever I think of Thompson, I go back to that quote from Nietzche: ‘Beware of casting off your shadows--they may be the best side of you.’ �

Thompson’s family sees this revival as a just reward. “My dad always believed his time would come,� said Sharon Thompson Reed. “He told my mother and myself that he might not be here someday, but his books would still be around, being read and appreciated. He’d say--don’t worry, those books will take care of you.�

A JIM THOMPSON SAMPLER

I lay on the bed while she had her bath. She came back in from it, wiping herself with a big towel, and got some panties and a brassiere out of a suitcase. She stepped into the panties, humming, and brought the brassiere over to me. I helped her put it on, giving her a pinch or two, and she giggled and wiggled.

I’m gonna to miss you baby, I thought. You’ve got to go, but I’m sure going to miss you . . .

She didn’t get it at all. “Lou. I won’t let you do anything to Elmer! You mustn’t, honey. They’ll catch you and you’ll go to jail and--oh, honey, don’t even think about it!�

“They won’t catch me,� I said. “They won’t even suspect me. They’ll think he was half-stiff, like he usually is, and you got to fighting and both got killed.�

She still didn’t get it. She laughed, frowning a little at the same time. “But Lou--that doesn’t make sense. How could I be dead when . . . “

“Easy,� I said and I gave her a slap. And still she didn’t get it.

She put a hand to her face and rubbed it slowly. “You better not do that, now, Lou. I’ve got to travel and . . . “

“You’re not going anywhere, baby,� I said and I hit her again.

And at last she got it.

--�The Killer Inside Me.� 1952.

“Take the bottle with you,� she said. “You look lonely and a bottle can be a lot of company.�

She stood on tiptoe and kissed me; and afterwards she leaned against me for a moment, her head against my chest. She made a mighty nice armful, all warmness and fullness and sweet-smelling softness. I brushed her thick black hair with my lips, and she sighed and shivered. And moved out of my arms.

“Just go,� she said. “And keep going. She turned on the porchlight for me so I could find my way across the yard. Where the lane entered the trees, I turned around and waved. The lights went off. If she waved back, I didn’t see her. I picked my way down the lane, taking a sip from the bottle now and then. A couple of times I stumbled and fell down . . .

I’d seen my last of that place, I thought. It was gone away, vanished into the darkness. I’d never been there, and it had never been there.

But it was there. I hadn’t seen the last of it.

--�After Dark, My Sweet.� 1955.

Aimed straight at the heart, Doc’s bullet felled Rudy Torrento like a streak of lightning. He stopped breathing, all conscious movement. His eyes glazed, his wedge-shaped face became a foolish, frozen mask, and he crumpled silently backward, an idiot doll cast aside by its master.

The back of his head struck against a rock in the bed of the stream. The impact deepened and extended his deathlike state. So, far from giving him a second bullet, Doc McCoy hardly gave him a second glance.

And less than thirty minutes after Doc’s departure, Rudy came to life again.

--�The Getaway.� 1959