Part Seven: The End of B.K. (For Now) and a Blockbuster Hit at Last B.K. Troop wasn’t quite done with Allison Burnett. While there wasn’t exactly a high demand for more books filled with his neurotically moving and bitchily brilliant narration, it didn’t stop Burnett from writing a third novel in his trilogy. In fact, […]

Bringing Jim Thompson to the screen cannot be an easy task. To date, the best adaptation of the 1950’s pulp novelist’s work is Stephen Frears’s The Grifters. That 1990 film combined Thompson’s hard-boiled dialogue (appropriately adapted by fellow crime writer Donald E. Westlake for the screenplay) with a stylized glaze of noir, resulting in an […]

Part Six: More Frustrations, a Strike, and the Birth of Katie Like every screenwriter, there are a number of “great unmades” in Allison Burnett’s drawer. Perhaps his most industry-respected is his adaptation of Andrea Di Robilant’s celebrated historical romance, A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century.   Burnett wrote the […]

Adventures in Paradise actor Gardner McKay’s novel, Toyer, is a haunting and inventive thriller. Also produced as a play by McKay, the novel is a compulsively readable, if not slightly long-winded, examination of the media’s relationship with violence, the dark side of Los Angeles, and madness in and of itself. The heroine of Toyer is […]

Part Five: B.K.’s Silent Return and a Champion Hollywood Fight Backtracking slightly from the end of our last installment, Allison Burnett’s screenwriting career proved to continue without disruption– in spite of Autumn in New York’s failed reception and his public feud with Richard Gere. Surprisingly, as far as he could perceive, the entire debacle failed to […]

Novelist, screenwriter, and director S. Craig Zahler continues to impress with his latest-published book, Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child. Following the footsteps of Tim Burton, Caroline Thompson, and the David Lynch of The Elephant Man, Hug is a gothic representation of the outsider that is beautifully and masterfully executed. The title character, […]

Part Four: The Smell of Rain Brings Forth Fulfillment For his next screenplay, Burnett returned to the core of an idea that was present in both Red Meat and his first unpublished novel, Orwell’s Year: a self-centered man who selflessly falls in love with a terminally ill young woman. This time around, Burnett altered his […]

Part Three: Devoured by Red Meat After the disappointment of Bleeding Hearts and since he could now “afford to draw a line in the sand” with the sale of his Freckles screenplay, Allison Burnett was ready to face the next challenge that so many screenwriters long for: directing. In writing the screenplay for what would […]

Expectations can kill a movie quicker than just about anything. A great director, actor, or actress in its credits, beloved source material that inspired it, or a successful predecessor in its franchise can dampen our reaction to a film every bit as much as they create the hype that propels us to want to see […]

Part Two: Going Solo Allison Burnett met Mark Evan Jacobs, a fledgling producer, actor, and businessman (not to mention the son of a predatory businessman named Irwin L. Jacobs, nicknamed “Irv the Liquidator”), through friends in the late eighties. A few years later, Jacobs made Burnett an offer: write a script about racism with a […]