Lorenzo Semple Jr. was one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1970s and '80s, working on star-studded films such as "Papillon," with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman; "Three Days of the Condor," headlined by Robert Redford; and "Never Say Never Again," Sean Connery's last movie as James Bond. "Almost all the good scripts I've been involved in, I've been fired off of for one reason or another," he said in a 2011 video interview conducted by the Writers Guild Foundation. Mr. Semple simply loved the craft of writing, and he had little use for the rest of what went into moviemaking, except as fodder for hilarious stories he would tell about star egos and meetings with studio executives. After not being active in the movie business for a couple of decades, he experienced a new surge of popularity in 2007 in front of the camera on "Reel Geezers," a series of online shows he did with veteran agent Marcia Nasatir in which they would review current films and bicker. [...] when I got to doing a couple other things, you had to have meetings and talk to people, and it wasn't any fun. Despite Mr. Semple's disdain for the inner workings of Hollywood, Nasatir said, he was assigned to big movies for two reasons: Fabulous dialogue and great storytelling. Unusual visionDozier told him with derision that the ABC network wanted them to create a live series based on the "Batman" comic books.
Reported by SFGate 22 hours ago.
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