It was a sense of disgust as a moviegoer that inspired Alan Trustman, a corporate lawyer at a white-shoe Boston firm, to take a shot as a Hollywood screenwriter in the mid-1960s. After suffering through an awful film at a drive-in one night, he complained to a friend, “Hell, if I couldn’t write a better story than that, I’d give up.”
Although he had never written “a line except for contracts and legal briefs,” Mr. Trustman recalled in a 1967 interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, he spent every Sunday afternoon for two months hammering out a script about a bank heist while watching his beloved New York Giants play football on TV.
That hobbyist endeavor eventually evolved into the screenplay for “The Thomas Crown Affair,” a stylish and successful 1968 caper starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.
Mr. Trustman — who died on Feb. 5 in a Miami nursing home at 95, his son, John, said — went on to carve out a brief but vivid career writing for the big screen. His next credit was another McQueen classic, “Bullitt,” also from 1968, about an ice-cool San Francisco police detective chasing (at times, on four wheels) underworld baddies.
Another of his movies, “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!” (1970), which he wrote with James R. Webb, was a follow-up to the Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” (1967). The film starred Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a steely homicide detective who fights racial prejudice while investigating the murder of a prostitute.
Mr. Trustman’s scripts were known for their taut dialogue, which made them a perfect match for the tough, taciturn and irresistibly suave Mr. McQueen.
“The Thomas Crown Affair” — remade in 1999, with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo — was the story of a dashing young Boston multimillionaire with a House of Lords lifestyle who masterminds, for kicks, what he considers the perfect bank robbery.
Opposite him is Vicki Anderson (Ms. Dunaway), an insurance company investigator who, swathed in au courant ensembles seemingly plucked from Vogue’s September issue, can’t seem to decide whether to drag Thomas Crown to justice or to the altar.
Mr. Trustman said he wrote “The Thomas Crown Affair” with Sean Connery in mind. When producers pivoted to Mr. McQueen, Mr. Trustman holed up at the United Artists offices in New York City for 16-hour days, retooling the dialogue to suit the star.
While some lines, like “It’s my funeral, you’re just along for the ride” might have recalled the detective fiction of Mickey Spillane, they pleased Mr. McQueen.
“I don’t know how,” he once said of Mr. Trustman, but he “knows me.”
Mr. Trustman’s hard-boiled dialogue fit seamlessly into the grittier “Bullitt,” a film remembered as a quintessential McQueen vehicle showcasing a quintessential McQueen vehicle: his character’s Highland green 1968 Ford Mustang fastback, which he barrels up and down the ski-slope-steep streets of San Francisco in a chase scene that is considered one of Hollywood’s greatest.
In a review for The New York Times, the critic Renata Adler praised the script — which Mr. Trustman, credited alongside Harry Kleiner and Robert L. Fish, adapted from Mr. Fish’s 1963 novel “Mute Witness” — noting that it was “written the way people talk.”
In a 2018 interview with the car site Hagerty, Mr. Trustman said the chase sequence, which he meticulously plotted in the script, recalled his own experiences racing down San Francisco’s hills while living there one summer during law school. He recalled telling the film’s producer, Philip D’Antoni, “You know, if you get a light car — even a four-door — and drive fast down those hills, you can fly through the air at the intersections.”
Alan Robert Trustman was born on Dec. 16, 1930, in Brookline, Mass., the eldest of two children of Benjamin Trustman and Julia (Myerson) Trustman. His father was a partner at the law firm Nutter, McClennen & Fish in Boston.
After Alan graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1948, he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1952 and a law degree in 1955 — both from Harvard — before joining Nutter, eventually making partner.
When the William Morris Agency quickly sold “The Thomas Crown Affair” script to United Artists, he told The Star-Ledger, he felt like Lana Turner, the star who was discovered “sipping a malt in a drugstore.”
The film received mixed reviews. In The Times, Ms. Adler called it “an ordinary, not wonderful, but highly enjoyable movie.” Pauline Kael of The New Yorker deemed it “pretty good trash.”
Regardless, Mr. Trustman was suddenly a player in Hollywood, even if his run as a go-to screenwriter for Mr. McQueen was a short one. The two quarreled while working on the script for what became “Le Mans” (1971), Mr. McQueen’s oil-soaked drama about the 24-hour French auto race. The writer, for example, pushed back on the star’s idea to cast himself as a loser.
Their differences proved irreconcilable. “Thank God I wasn’t involved,” Mr. Trustman told Hagerty, the car site. “I think he went through 10 to 15 directors and 10 to 15 writers and fired pretty much everybody in his life.”
Still, their mutual agent, Stan Kamen, insisted that Mr. Trustman had embarrassed Mr. McQueen. After that, Mr. Trustman later recalled, “the phone stopped ringing.”
He gathered a few more screen credits, collaborating on scripts for “Lady Ice” with Donald Sutherland and “Hit!” with Billy Dee Williams (both 1973). After his film career was further delayed by a writer’s strike in Hollywood in the mid-1970s, he moved to Miami, where he oversaw parimutuel gambling operations for World Jai Alai, which his father had served as a founding director.
Mr. Trustman also lived for a period in Switzerland, where he proved successful trading currencies and precious metals and was also an avid roulette player. He eventually wove his high-stakes insights into a 1992 action-suspense novel, “Father’s Day.”
In addition to his son, John, Mr. Trustman is survived by his wife, Dr. Barbara Buchwald, a psychiatrist whom he married in 2008; a daughter, Laurie Sanger; and 11 grandchildren. His marriages to Renée Rapaporte, the mother of his children, and Deborah Weisgall ended in divorce. His third wife, Michelle Urry, the longtime cartoons editor for Playboy magazine, died in 2006, and another son from his marriage to Ms. Rapaporte, Steven, died in 2010.
Looking back on his career, Mr. Trustman expressed no regrets about his rise-and-fall career in Hollywood. Even early on, he considered himself lucky just to have slipped through the door.
“There’s no justice,” he told The Star-Ledger. “Hundreds of screenwriters in New York and Hollywood have far more talent and have struggled for years to get a break such as this.”
Reporting contributed by Geraldine Fabrikant.
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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