Cancer has this nasty habit of taking away screenwriters whose work I respected greatly. Troy Kennedy Martin died today at the age of 77. This obit will tell you some of this credits, which included the movies Kelly's Heroes, Red Heat and Red Dust, as well as a wonderful British TV series called Reilly, Ace of Spies.
A very uncomfortable moment in my life came about because Mr. Martin was hired to adapt a comic book I'd co-created — The DNAgents — for a TV series. He was the second of about eighty thousand writers (it seemed) to tackle the property during the several times it was optioned by CBS, and I was at first jubilant because I'd admired so much of his work. But then it became apparent that what he wanted to do with the series was not what I wanted, nor did it please co-creator, Will Meugniot. It also did not please CBS so we went on to Pilot Writer #3 and Pilot Writer #4 and so on.
But the odd thing is that what Mr. Martin wrote was quite brilliant and might have made a wonderful one-time (with no possible sequels) R-rated feature film. It was just wildly over the budget (and restrictions of sex and violence) for what it was supposed to be, which was a weekly, ongoing TV series that would air at 8 PM. I came across my copy of his script again a few years later and was struck by how well-written it was, even if it was all wrong for the assignment at hand. I still feel bad about the meeting where he asked me point-blank what I thought of it and I had to tell him it wouldn't do…because he was a very nice man and very passionate about his work. If you saw some of the things he wrote that did get filmed, I think you could tell that. They were all quite impressive.