Walter Hill (filmmaker) - Screenwriter

Screenwriter

Hill's first screenplay, a Western called Lloyd Williams and His Brother, was optioned in 1969 by Joe Wizan, but it was never made. At one point, Sam Peckinpah expressed interest in filming it after The Getaway (1972) which became the first of Hill's screenplays to be produced as a film. Peckinpah ended up doing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid instead.

Peter Bogdanovich's ex-wife Polly Platt, a film editor, had read Hill's script for Hickey & Boggs and recommended him to co-write The Getaway with Bogdanovich. They worked on the script together in San Francisco while Bogdanovich was directing What's Up, Doc? They had completed 25 pages when they went back to L.A., whereupon Steve McQueen fired Bogdanovich without reading any of their work. Hill started from scratch and wrote his own script in six weeks.

Hill went on to write a pair of Paul Newman films, The Mackintosh Man and The Drowning Pool. By Hill's own admission, his work on The Mackintosh Man "wasn't much" and he did it for the money. In addition, he and director John Huston disagreed on how closely to stick to the book on which it was based. Producers Larry Turman and David Foster asked Hill to adapt Ross Macdonald's novel The Drowning Pool for Robert Mulligan to direct as a sequel to a previous Newman film, Harper. The producers did not like the direction Hill took with his script, so he left the project to write Hard Times for Larry Gordon at Columbia Pictures.