Stirling Silliphant

Stirling Dale Silliphant (January 16, 1918 – April 26, 1996) was an American screenwriter and producer. He is best known for his screenplay for In the Heat of the Night, for which he won an Academy Award in 1967, and for creating the television series Naked City and Route 66. Other features as screenwriter include the Irwin Allen productions The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.

Family

His father, Sterling Silliphant, was a Canadian who immigrated to the United States in 1911, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1916. His mother was Ethel M. Silliphant. He had one brother, Leigh, who was three years younger. Born in Detroit, Michigan, his family moved to Glendale, California when he was a child. He graduated from Hoover High School, and was educated at the University of Southern California.

Output

Silliphant was a film and television writer with more than 700 hours of prime-time television drama to his credit, many of which earned Emmys for their producers, directors, and cast members. However, he never received an Emmy personally as writer. Time in 1967 referred to him in a feature article with the statement: "The moving finger...having written, moved on!"

Production manager Sam Manners called him from the road unit of Route 66 from El Paso, Texas. He told Stirling they could save perhaps $100,000 if Stirling could write an extra story for the show that could be shot in El Paso while the production trucks and crew were there. Silliphant obliged, and had the script ready in a couple of days. The guest star was Albert Dekker, who was flown in to portray his part over the weekend.

Although he worked constantly in Hollywood, he had a well-known aversion against living in Southern California, where he had grown up. After he became successful, he built a house in Tiburon, California and commuted regularly by air to Los Angeles.

Television

In the earlier part of his career, he was publicity director for Walt Disney, and was lead writer on the stories incorporated into The Mickey Mouse Club. He produced several independent films such as 5 Against the House with Kim Novak, Huk! and Maracaibo. Later he broke into television, writing for the live Playhouse 90. Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock Presents soon followed.

Silliphant was known for his involvement in two TV series of the sixties, Route 66 and Naked City. Silliphant was quoted as saying that a number of his Naked City scripts were far superior to the script that won him the Oscar for In the Heat of the Night. He adapted eight half-hour episodes of Naked City into a tie-in paperback as well, which was published in 1959. One of his later series creations was Longstreet, which featured a blind detective played by James Franciscus, who had also starred in the first season of Naked City.

He wrote three television miniseries: Pearl (about the attack on Pearl Harbor), Space (based on the James Michener novel about America's early space program), and Mussolini: The Untold Story. He wrote the script for a never-produced TV miniseries of Atlas Shrugged, the novel by Ayn Rand.

Film

Silliphant wrote or co-wrote 47 feature films, including Maracaibo (produced and directed by and starring Cornel Wilde); the Jacques Tourneur noir Nightfall; Village of the Damned; the Charles Bronson spy thriller Telefon, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (director William Wyler's final film); The Killer Elite (directed by Sam Peckinpah); the Dirty Harry crime drama The Enforcer and the arm-wrestling story Over the Top (the latter with its star Sylvester Stallone).

In addition to the Academy Award, In the Heat of the Night also earned Silliphant an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. He helped to pull film concepts together. He penned the screenplay for Shaft in Africa, the third film in the Shaft series. With Chatrichalerm Yukol, he co-wrote the screenplay to the 1994 Thai action film, Salween.

He was a close friend of Bruce Lee, under whom he studied martial arts. Lee was featured in the Silliphant-penned detective movie Marlowe and four episodes of the series Longstreet. Silliphant reportedly recommended Lee for action choreography work. They had been working on a philosophical martial arts script, The Silent Flute (later known as Circle of Iron), which was to star Lee and James Coburn, and the pre-production even went to the extent of all three going to India on a location hunt. (A reliable source for this story is Bruce Thomas's book Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit, pp. 129–130. The reason for the India trip was because Warner Brothers could not repatriate money their films made in India because of foreign exchange regulations. They green-lit the project on the condition that the film Siliphant, Coburn and Lee made would be shot in India to use up the money lying unused in Warner Bros's accounts.)

His last screenplay was for the 1995 film The Grass Harp.

Death

He died in 1996 in Bangkok, Thailand, where he had resided since 1988.^[1] His work papers are archived at UCLA's Westwood campus.^[5]

References

Further reading

• Segaloff, Nat, Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God, BearManor Media, 2013. ISBN 9781593937584

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Stirling Silliphant

• Stirling Silliphant on IMDb
• Stirling Silliphant profile at The Original Mickey Mouse Club Show website