By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: screenwriter Jo Heims, who penned Play Misty For Me (pictured above), You’ll Like My Mother, Breezy, Double Trouble and more.
In our Unsung Auteurs entry on Every Which Way But Loose director James Fargo, we noted the large contingent of talented creatives nurtured and encouraged by – but also often caught in the shadow of – the great Clint Eastwood. Along with those of Richard Tuggle, Buddy Van Horn, Lennie Niehaus, Bruce Surtees and David Valdes, one name which we forgot to mention was that of screenwriter Jo Heims, an utterly essential figure in the beginnings of Eastwood’s directing career.
“Well, I had this friend, a lady friend, Jo Heims, who was a production secretary at Universal,” Clint Eastwood told The Metrograph. “We used to sit and drink beer together in Hollywood, and she was always saying, ‘I want to write movies.’ I never thought too much about that…we’d just have a few beers. One day she came in and she had this story called Play Misty For Me.”
1971’s Play Misty For Me would, of course, be Clint Eastwood’s first film as a director. Jo Heims’ script about a radio DJ stalked and harassed by an increasingly deranged woman was polished by Dean Reisner, and Eastwood added in a few elements of his own. “It was written to be done somewhere in Los Angeles,” Eastwood told The Metrograph. “I thought, ‘No, this would be great in a small town.’ Because in a small town, disc jockeys are a big deal. A lot of them become interesting people in their communities. I said, ‘This would be great in the community I live in in my spare time, Carmel in Monterey County.’ So I picked all the locations in Monterey County and made the movie.”
The utterly absorbing and highly entertaining Play Misty For Me was a smash hit (and a huge influence on 1987’s Fatal Attraction, by the way), and it set Clint Eastwood off on an impressive course of behind-the-camera acclaim that would inspire many other actors to turn director in the years subsequent. And it all began with Jo Heims, a strangely under-celebrated female screenwriter who was churning out scripts at a time when the field was very much dominated – as were most things in Hollywood – by men.
Joyce Heims was born in Philadelphia in 1930, and worked as a model, dancer, and fashion illustrator before moving to California in the 1950s to become a writer. While biographical material on Heims is limited, her first screen credit was as a production secretary on the 1958 science fiction movie Missile To The Moon. Heims worked primarily as a secretary throughout the 1960s while writing and selling screenplays on the side. Her work was crisp, efficient and rock-solid, which saw many of her scripts put into production by low budget production companies.
Heims’ first screenwriting credits came with two lurid crime thrillers – 1960’s The Threat with Robert Knapp and that same year’s The Girl In Lovers’ Lane – and a 1961 horror potboiler called The Devil’s Hand. Heims also penned western programmers (1963’s The Gun Hawk, 1964’s Navajo Run), a romantic drama (1965’s Tell Me In The Sunlight), a coming-of-age comedy (1969’s The First Time), and episodes of the TV series The Fugitive and Here Come The Brides. Heims also wrote the script for what would become the goofy 1967 Elvis Presley vehicle Double Trouble (directed by Unsung Auteur Norman Taurog), though her substantially rewritten original screenplay actually featured a female leading character, and had originally been earmarked for actress Julie Christie.
Showing a strong facility for pumping out genre-spanning scripts easily adaptable for producers operating on limited means, Jo Heims was very much a working screenwriter until the success of Play Misty For Me and the patronage of Clint Eastwood gave her a little more cache. After that huge success (Heims’ script was tight, exciting, imaginative and very well characterised), Heims took another script to the burgeoning director. The charming 1973 drama Breezy follows a wealthy, middle-aged divorcee who has an affair with a much, much younger and very free-spirited hippy girl.
“After Play Misty For Me, I just kept going,” Eastwood told The Metrograph. “I did one called Breezy by the same writer, Jo Heims. I didn’t want to play in that, so I got William Holden; I thought it would be a great opportunity to get a lot of experience and work with somebody I really like. Jo had given me the material because she thought I could play it, but I thought it needed somebody a little older than me. Fortunately, Holden liked it. I guess he liked having a teenage girlfriend. It was a very different story from Play Misty For Me. I just kept trying different things all the time. Once in a while, they’d work.”
Heims suggested her friend Sondra Locke for the role of the young hippy. Though the wonderful Kay Lenz eventually scored the part, Clint Eastwood of course began a very public relationship with the late Sondra Locke which would span many years and many cinematic collaborations. Along with John Milius and Terrence Malick, Heims also did uncredited work on the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s epochal 1971 smash hit Dirty Harry. Again, the importance of Jo Heims in Clint Eastwood’s creative (and personal) career cannot be overstated.
Away from Clint Eastwood, Jo Heims penned a fistful of other fascinating films and telemovies. The most notable was 1972’s You’ll Like My Mother, directed by Lamont Johnson. Adapted from the novel by Naomi A. Hintze, this is a wonderfully perverse horror-thriller which pits Patty Duke’s pregnant war widow against Rosemary Murphy’s foreboding mother-in-law, who presides over a rattling closet of family skeletons. Heims also did uncredited revisions on the 1977 cult freakout Death Game, which starred her friend Sondra Locke, along with Seymour Cassel and Colleen Camp, and was later remade by Eli Roth as Knock Knock in 2015 with Keanu Reeves.
Jo Heims penned two enjoyably lurid telemovies – 1976’s wildly entertaining women-in-prison shocker Nightmare In Badham County and 1978’s Secrets Of Three Hungry Wives, about three married women who become suspects when a man they all had an affair with is murdered – before very sadly passing away way too young at the age of just 48 in 1978 from breast cancer. Jo Heims was not just a vital figure in the career of one of American cinema’s true icons, but also a gifted screenwriter in her own right.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Lee H. Katzin, Christoper Cain, Ken Wiederhorn, Barbara Loden, David Mackenzie, Alan Rudolph, James Lee Barrett, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
