Alan Sharp
| Alan Sharp | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1934 Alyth, Scotland |
| Occupation | novelist screenwriter |
Alan Sharp (b. 1934 in Alyth, Scotland) a novelist and screenwriter. He published two novels in the 1960s, and since then has written the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States.
Sharp was raised in Greenock, Scotland, where his adoptive father worked in the shipyards. He left school at 14 to work in the yards. He pursued various jobs, did his national service, and married. He ultimately relocated to London with the intention of becoming a writer.[1] One of his screenplays was broadcast on British television in 1963, and his play A Knight in Tarnished Armour was broadcast in 1965. His first novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, was published in 1965 to acclaim and won the 1967 Scottish Arts Council Award.[1][2] It was the first part of a proposed trilogy, and Sharp published the second novel, The Wind Shifts, in 1967. The third novel, which had the working title The Apple Pickers,[2] was left incomplete when Sharp emigrated to Hollywood and focused on screenwriting.
In the 1970s, six of Sharp's screenplays became high-profile Hollywood feature films, most of them dealing with quintessentially American themes and characters. Walter Chaw writes of Sharp's screenplays from this period, "On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana's Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly-regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp's screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom."[3] Trevor Johnston has written recently, "There’s an argument to suggest that a certain seventysomething Scot could well be Britain’s greatest living screenwriter. Much is made of pre-Star Wars 70s Hollywood as a kind of celluloid golden age, and Alan Sharp was there in the thick of it, working with the very best, generating the sort of track record few British screenwriters are likely to match."[4]
David N. Meyer has incorporated an appreciation of Sharp's writing in his review of Night Moves (directed by Arthur Penn-1975). Following a description of an important seduction scene from the film, Meyer adds: "These delicious, poisonous moments – these cookies full of arsenic – come courtesy of Alan Sharp's venomous, entrapping, perfectly circular screenplay. It's hard not to regard him – rather than Penn – as the engine of Night Moves' enduring power. Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television."[5]
Since the 1980s, most of Sharp's screenplays have been for American television productions. His 1993 television screenplay (with Walter Klenhard) for The Last Hit was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (best TV feature or miniseries).[6] His feature film projects have included The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah's swan song-1982), Rob Roy (1995), Dean Spanley (2008), and Burns (in production). Quentin Curtis called the screenplay for Rob Roy "one of the best screenplays in the last decade".[7]
The actress Rudi Davies is the daughter of Sharp and writer Beryl Bainbridge.
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[edit] Bibliography
- A Green Tree in Gedde (New Edition). Richard Drew. 1987. ISBN 978-0-86267-129-7. Re-issue of Sharp's 1965 novel.
- The Wind Shifts. London: Michael Joseph. 1967. ISBN 978-0-450-00362-2.
- The Hired Hand. Bantam Books. 1971. ISBN 978-0-552-08772-8.
- Night Moves. Warner Paperback Library. 1975. ISBN 978-0-446-76626-5.
- Lord Dunsany (2008). Dean Spanley: The Novel. Harper. ISBN 978-0-00-729045-1. Film tie-in incorporating the original 1936 novella and Sharp's screenplay.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Pendreigh, Brian (September 18, 2002). "Sharp Shooter". iofilm. http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/interviews/a/alan_sharp.shtml. Retrieved 2010-10-19.
- ^ a b Nichols, Lewis (April 28, 1968). "American Notebook". The New York Times. "Alan Sharp, the young British writer who began a trilogy with the well-received "Green Tree in Gedde" and continued with the recently published but less well-received "The Wind Shifts," is halfway through the final volume, to be called "The Apple Pickers."" Subscription required.
- ^ Chaw, Walter (April 14, 2010). "Night Moves". Film Freak Central. http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/nightmoves.htm.
- ^ Johnston, Trevor (January 13, 2009). "Dean Spanley". The Script Factory. http://www.scriptfactory.co.uk/go/News/Reviews/Article_25.html. Retrieved 2010-10-21. Trevor Johnston is a film critic for Time Out London. His article is a detailed appreciation of Sharp's adaptation of Lord Dunsany's 1936 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, for the film Dean Spanley (2008).
- ^ Meyer, David N. (May 3, 2009). "Any Kennedy: The Merciless, Blinding Sunshine of Night Moves". Film Noir of the Week. Archived from the original on 2010-08-25. http://www.webcitation.org/5sFvoZAUr.
- ^ Search at "The Edgar Awards Database". http://www.theedgars.com/edgarsDB/index.php.
- ^ Curtis, Quentin (May 21, 1995). "Cinema / Och aye, such noble derring-do!". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cinema--och-aye-such-noble-derringdo-1620492.html. "The first point to make about Alan Sharp's script is that it travesties history, bearing only the flimsiest resemblance to the facts of Rob's life, and importing a great deal of sensationalism (such as the rape of Rob's wife by Cunningham). The second point is that it's one of the best screenplays of the last decade. Sharp, who is returning to his roots, after scripting Hollywood classics such as Ulzana's Raid and Night Moves, has married the narrative complexity of the classic Western and film noir, to an earthy Scottish naturalism. The result is not so much like Walter Scott (whose novel Rob Roy barely dealt with the hero) as James Boswell, when in tumultuous mood, with the whoring rage upon him."
[edit] Further reading
- Herdman, John (1972). "Alan Sharp's Journey". Scottish International Review 5: 20. http://books.google.com/books?id=GGQYAQAAIAAJ. Feature story from a now defunct literary journal.
- Schoene, Berthold (1995). "Angry Young Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Homophobia and Misogyny in the Scottish Novels of Alan Sharp". In Whyte, Christopher. Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh University Press. p. 85.
