The Times (08/Jun/1993) - Obituary: James Bridges
(c) The Times (08/Jun/1993)
Obituary: James Bridges
James Bridges, Hollywood writer-director, died of cancer in Los Angeles on June 6 aged 57. He was born in Paris, Arkansas, in 1935.
The films of James Bridges included The China Syndrome for which he shared an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay and The Paper Chase, which turned the eminent producer and director John Houseman into a film star at the age of 71. Bridges wrote and directed his own scripts, sometimes based on original stories, sometimes adaptations, that were always intelligent, elegantly wrought and usually with some wider social dimension, though they were seldom specifically political as he was more interested in individual human beings than causes.
Originally inspired partly by a teenage devotion to James Dean which he evoked in his autobiographical film September 30, 1955 (the date of Dean's fatal car crash), James Bridges wanted to be an actor. During the later 1950s he made it, in a small way, playing minor roles in television series like Dragnet. Wisely, no doubt, he decided to follow also his bent for writing, and was encouraged by no less a figure than Alfred Hitchcock, for whose television series he wrote several scripts in 1964.
Eventually, he was to find his true metier by combining writing with direction of actors rather than acting himself. In the mid-1960s he met Jack Larson, who was to be his lifelong companion, when he directed Larson's play The Candied House. He did other theatrical work at this time, but his ideas tended increasingly towards the cinema. He first edged his way in as a writer, working on the scripts of, among others, the Marlon Brando western The Appaloosa (1966) and The Forbin Project, an intelligent science-fiction thriller.
Immediately after this he managed, against all odds, to direct his own script for The Baby Maker, a sensitive small-budget feature about a young woman who undertakes to have a baby on behalf of a childless couple. This formed the pattern for his subsequent work.
While The Baby Maker was a succes d'estime, his next film, The Paper Chase (1973), about the greening of an ambitious young lawyer, was a big box office hit. John Houseman, who had never previously acted, played a crusty and intimidating law professor a success continued in a major television series. Bridges seemed to tackle the intimidating job of directing the great director with surprising confidence. After returning to small-scale production with September 30, 1955, he was selected by Tennessee Williams to direct the 25th anniversary revival of A Streetcar Named Desire on stage, and then took on the even more intimidating job of directing three of the biggest stars of the day: Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, in The China Syndrome, a crisp and serious thriller about attempts to cover up a meltdown in a Californian nuclear power station.
This proved to be the peak of his career. His next film, Urban Cowboy (1979), starring John Travolta as a self-infatuated hustler type in Pasadena, did not quite hit its target, and during the 1980s he worked less, though he continued to make the occasional interesting film up to his last, Bright Lights, Big City (1988), which featured Michael J.Fox as a yuppie in booming New York getting involved with drink and drugs, right to the edge of insanity.
Personally Bridges was mild and unassuming, much approved of by Hollywood seniors who saw him (correctly) as a gentleman and an intelligence in a world increasingly dominated by the brash bully-boys.
Actors liked him for the same reason. And it was probably for the same reason that he did not get further, faster; in the Hollywood of the 1980s his kind of personal film was already becoming an anachronism.
