Jeremy Larner, whose experience as a speechwriter for Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s 1968 Democratic presidential campaign informed his Oscar-winning screenplay of “The Candidate,” a cynical, humorous 1972 film about a young liberal lawyer played by Robert Redford who wins a long-shot race for the Senate, died on Feb. 24 in Oakland, Calif. He was 88.
His son Jesse confirmed the death, in a nursing facility, but said he did not know the cause. Mr. Larner had been diagnosed with lymphoma in January and Parkinson’s disease in 2013.
Mr. Larner was a novelist and freelance journalist when he was hired by Mr. McCarthy, a Minnesotan known for his cerebral, detached personality and was a serious contender for the Democratic nomination along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Amid the divisions caused by the war, President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation with his withdrawal from the race in March 1968.
Mr. Larner joined the campaign shortly before the Wisconsin primary — which Mr. McCarthy handily won — giving him an insider’s knowledge of the senator’s strengths and flaws through the fractious Democratic National Convention. Mr. Humphrey won the nomination but lost in the general election to Richard M. Nixon.
Mr. Redford, who played Bill McKay, the young lawyer in “The Candidate,” and Michael Ritchie, its director, turned to Mr. Larner after a script written by the columnist and author Pete Hamill was deemed not satirical enough, according to “Robert Redford: The Biography” (2011), by Michael Feeney Callan.
Mr. Larner had been recommended to Mr. Redford, an uncredited executive producer, by Bill Bradley, a friend of both men and who years later was elected to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey. Mr. Bradley had been the subject of a profile by Mr. Larner in Life magazine in 1968 when he was a forward for the New York Knicks.
By 1971, when Mr. Larner was hired for “The Candidate,” he had already established himself as a screenwriter. He and Jack Nicholson had written the script for “Drive, He Said,” which they adapted from Mr. Larner’s well-reviewed 1964 novel whose protagonist is a college basketball player at a small school in upstate New York. (Mr. Nicholson directed the film, which starred Bruce Dern.)
For “The Candidate,” Mr. Larner said that he initially objected to the story that Mr. Redford wanted him to tell: A liberal candidate sells out on the way to upsetting the front-runner.
“In my experience, they don’t sell out,” he was quoted as saying in Mr. Callan’s book. “They get carried away.” Mr. Redford did not like that response, and Mr. Larner eventually gave in.
To develop the screenplay, Mr. Larner used some of what had observed on Mr. McCarthy’s campaign trail; traveled for a week with Senator John V. Tunney of California; and watched political documentaries like Robert Drew’s “Primary” (1960).
The titular character in the film was never meant to resemble Mr. McCarthy, however. “He was meant to be a Kennedy-esque liberal,” Mr. Larner told Brooklyn Magazine in 2016. “But no doubt he was more innocent than the Kennedys were.”
The film follows the idealistic McKay, a public interest lawyer and son of a former California governor, as he faces off against Senator Crocker Jarmon in what seems to be a near-certain losing effort. As he makes compromises to be more electable, McKay “starts speaking the very nonsense that made him hesitate to run in the first place,” Mr. Larner wrote in 1988, describing the character in an Opinion essay in The New York Times.
The emptiness of McKay’s upset victory is reflected at the end, when he helplessly asks his campaign manager (played by Peter Boyle), “What do we do now?”
In 2012, Time magazine named “The Candidate” one of the 15 best political films of all time, calling it an “unsentimental, mordantly funny dissection of big-time politics.”
When Mr. Larner accepted the Oscar for best original screenplay, he thanked “the political figures of our time, who’ve given me terrific inspiration,” drawing laughter from the audience.
Jeremy David Larner was born on March 20, 1937, in Olean, N.Y., and grew up in Indianapolis. His father, Martin, ran an auto parts business, and his mother, Clara (Bronstein) Larner, managed the home and was active in civic and charitable work.
After graduating from Brandeis University in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature, Mr. Larner wrote journalism for Life, Dissent and The Atlantic, and a short story for The Paris Review. He was also an organizer of the national moratorium and march to end the Vietnam War in the fall of 1969, which he wrote about in Life.
In 1969, Mr. Larner published in Harper’s magazine a lengthy and critical postmortem of the McCarthy campaign that was turned into a book, “Nobody Knows: Reflections on the McCarthy Campaign of 1968,” in 1970.
After Mr. Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, Mr. Larner wrote, Senator McCarthy seemed like “the only viable national leader.” But during the summer, he withdrew, self-absorbed to passively wind down his campaign. “McCarthy regressed to his balanced presentation of self,” Mr. Larner added, “to the sacred ceremony of his personality.”
In addition to “Drive, He Said,” which won the Delta Prize for first novels, Mr. Larner wrote another novel, “The Answer” (1968), a chronicle of drug trips that involved a character like the LSD guru Timothy Leary. He also edited books about poverty and drug addiction and wrote “Chicken on Church and Other Poems” (2006). The title poem is an epic that he wrote after seeing a man in a chicken suit on Church Street in Manhattan.
He never had another film produced from any of his screenplays, of which he wrote about a dozen, despite his work at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios and Mr. Redford’s Sundance Institute.
During his time at Sundance two years earlier, he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1989, he sat around a table one day with “five screenwriters with six Oscars between them. Of the five, no one had had a movie done in 10 years.”
His son Jesse said in an interview with The Times, “He was 35 when he won an Oscar and thought his career was made and he could do anything. But he couldn’t.”
In addition to Jesse, Mr. Larner is survived by another son, Zachary; a brother, Daniel; and a grandson. His marriages to Susan Berlin, the mother of his sons, and Christie Wallace ended in divorce.
During the 1988 presidential campaign, Dan Quayle, the Republican vice-presidential running mate of George W. Bush, said he had been inspired by “The Candidate,” which he had seen as a young man.
Mr. Larner, in his Times essay that year, included a response to Mr. Quayle. He informed him that he had missed the point: The film was about the superficiality of politics and how candidates are marketed.
“Sorry, Senator Quayle, you thought we were telling you ‘how-to,’” Mr. Larner wrote, “when we were trying to say: watch out. You missed the irony. Unless, in a way I never could have foreseen, you are the irony.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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