By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: late producer/writer David Giler, who penned The Parallax View, Myra Breckinridge and Southern Comfort.
When you’re largely known for one thing – and when you’re strongly associated with another, very highly regarded, figure – it’s often difficult to get your due, which is pretty much the case with the late David Giler. A longtime collaborator of the great Walter Hill (the action maestro and cult hero director behind absolute belters like The Warriors, Streets Of Fire, Johnny Handsome, 48 Hrs., The Long Riders, The Driver and many more), Giler is probably best known as Hill’s occasional screenwriter, and also as his co-producer (they formed Brandywine Productions together) on various parts (some of them hotly disputed) of the monstrously tangled and production-nightmare-heavy Alien franchise. David Giler, however, also has a number of unusual and often highly impressive screenwriting credits on his resume, and certainly rates as a figure worthy of celebration on his own.
Born into the entertainment industry in 1943 in New York City, David Giler’s father was Bernie Giler, a prolific writer of episodic television. David Giler began his career collaborating with his father on episode teleplays for television shows like The Gallant Men (1962), Kraft Suspense Theatre (1964), Burke’s Law (1965), and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. (1967). After his father’s passing in 1967, David Giler lit out on his own, and began compiling his own list of credits. Always having an eye on the big screen, Giler had also worked on a number of feature screenplays (including an unproduced film called Our Bag), but received his first cinema credit when he was tapped by 20th Century Fox to adapt Gore Vidal’s scabrous, highly controversial novel Myra Breckinridge for director Mike Sarne.
One of the most unhinged (and most unjustly maligned) films ever made by a major Hollywood studio, the film kicks off with the simpering Myron (Rex Reed, one of America’s most high-profile film critics!) getting a sex change and emerging as…Raquel Welch! Now a true beauty (of course!) renamed Myra, she becomes a one-woman army for women’s liberation, leading to a swathe of plot points that literally defy description and anything resembling good taste, but which range from pegging (yes, pegging!) to the complete debasement of genuine Hollywood legends like Mae West and John Huston. Though director Mike Sarne allegedly rewrote much of Giler’s script, his name is still on this bizarro slab of Hollywood history, the effect of which is basically determined by, well, which side of the fence you sit on with regards to this highly divisive curio.
After uncredited work on the largely forgotten 1971 western Skin Game, Giler contributed to one of the all-time great paranoid thrillers with 1974’s The Parallax View. Along with high-profile scripter Lorenzo Semple Jr., Giler adapted Loren Singer’s novel for director Alan J. Pakula, who delivered nothing short of a masterclass in crafting a dark, foreboding mood and establishing a terrifying tableau in which nothing is as it seems and nobody can be trusted. Fittingly for this labyrinthine conspiracy thriller, the true nature of the film’s script is long debated, with leading man Warren Beatty, director Alan J. Pakula and master screenwriter Robert Towne allegedly doing a major rewrite on the material. Either way, just having his name on this masterful film gives David Giler instant cache.
Following The Parallax View, Giler made his sole film as writer/director with 1975’s The Black Bird, a kooky, sweet and inventive take on Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with George Segal playing the son of private detective Sam Spade, and stars Elisha Cook and Lee Patrick reprising their roles from John Huston’s 1941 classic. Though now almost completely forgotten, it’s a very interesting approach to a truly minted Hollywood legend. Giler co-scripted for George Segal again on 1977’s Ted Kotcheff-directed Fun With Dick & Jane, a solid and entertainingly topical comedy in which Segal and Jane Fonda’s middle-class couple goes broke and turns to bank robbery to make ends meet.
In 1979, after forming Brandywine Productions with Walter Hill and Gordon Carroll, the trio co-produced and claimed to have rewritten the script for director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, Alien. Giler and Hill got into a major stoush with Alien’s original writer, Dan O’Bannon (who had co-written and starred in John Carpenter’s 1974 cult fave Dark Star), over who would ultimately receive screenplay credit on Alien. Giler and Hill claim they completely rewrote the script, and believed O’Bannon was only due a “story by” credit. O’Bannon hit back and claimed that Giler and Hill only changed the names of the characters and revised some of the dialogue. After arbitration, O’Bannon was assessed as the sole screenwriter of Alien, alongside a “story by” co-credit with Ronald Shusett. Giler and Hill would remain attached to the Alien franchise, however, as both producers and writers, with a story credit on James Cameron’s Aliens and screenplay credit on David Fincher’s Alien 3.
After the dust-up on the first Alien film, Giler contributed to the script for Walter Hill’s excellent 1981 survivalist thriller Southern Comfort, a white-knuckle wonder in which a group of National Guardsmen find themselves at the mercy of a group of mysterious backwoodsmen. After scripting 1986’s thematically interesting but ultimately underwhelming comedy The Money Pit with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long, Giler and Hill collaborated again on 2002’s largely forgotten but highly entertaining prison boxing flick Undisputed with Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames.
David Giler passed away in 2020 from cancer in his home in Bangkok, and should be better remembered for his consistently interesting screenwriting than merely his role in the various backstage punch-ups on the Alien franchise.
The Parallax View screens at The Revelation Perth International Film Festival on July 7 at 5:00pm at Luna Cinemas, Leederville. For more information, click here.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs 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.
