If I have any alert readers, none came forward to ask me "what's up." Until now, I just didn't react enough to any news item, or an obituary, (they can be the same thing), until reading the New York Times obit on Alan Trustman by Alex Williams in Wednesday's paper.
The headline for Mr. Trustman goes: Alan Trustman, 95, Onetime Lawyer Who Wrote Scripts for McQueen Hits. He did this so long ago that I'm sure there are those who might wonder who is Steve McQueen, (if not a fashion designer) and what were his hits?
I don't know much about Alex Trustman, but I do know he has a way with words. And he's obviously well aware of Mr. Trustman's screenplays and Mr. McQueen's movies.
Must obituaries start off with the subject's name, then a comma. Nothing wrong with that . Gets right to the point. But I like the obits that start off differently, that lay a bit of the background of the deceased before we get to the required parts. A lede that is a bit improvisational works well.
Thus we get: "It was a sense of disgust as a moviegoer that inspired Alan Trustman, a corporate lawyer at a prestigious law firm, to take a shot as a Hollywood screenwriter in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Trustman knows the screenplays and the two McQueen hits well, when he tells us that opposite Mr. McQueen in the Thomas Crown affair, a heist caper engineered by Thomas Crown, a Boston millionaire (there were no billionaires then) who plans the perfect museum heist for kicks, is Faye Dunaway, playing Vicky Anderson, "an insurance investigator, who swathed in au courant ensembles seemingly plucked from Vogue's September issue, can't seem to decide whither to drag Thomas to justice or the altar." As anyone who has seen the movie knows, Vicky settles for something in between when she and Thomas share a cuddle together in bed.
And then there's Bullitt, the McQueen film that stars McQueen as an "ice-cool San Francisco police detective," as well as a Highland green 1968 Ford Mustang, that seems to flatten the "ski-slope steep streets" (talk about alliteration) of San Francisco with McQueen at the wheel, chasing a pair of bad guys to what will be their doom, in one of the great car chase scenes in movie history.
As interesting as Mr. Trustman's life might have been as a corporate lawyer, and an A-list Hollywood screenwriter, it was a hardly over when the phone stopped ringing for movie projects. He moved from occupations and pursuits that were:
•An overseer of pari-mutuel gambling operations for World Jai Alai, which his father had served as a founding director.
•Successful trader of currencies and precious metals while living in Switzerland.
•An avid roulette player.
He had a life well lived.
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