Stuart Kaminsky 1934-2009

[MatViola]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obit-kaminsky-13-oct13,0,5852247.story

[Dust Devil]

Never read any detective story of his, but his work on OUATIA is appreciated. He looked youngish.

R.I.P.

[Groggy]

I guess 75 is young in a world inhabited by Jenkins and CJ.

RIP to this gentleman, he seemed pretty cool from the interviews I've seen of him.

[MatViola]

Leone paid Kaminsky the ultimate compliment in a 1984 interview for the now-defunct magazine America Film: "Leo Benvenuti and Stuart Kaminsky miraculously concluded the screenplay, and away we went to the great adventure."

Kaminsky himself wrote about his contribution to the screenplay: "When I came to the project in 1981 and subsequently worked on the script for more than six months, the principal screenwriters were Enrico Medioli, Leo Benvenuti and Piero De Bernardi. Medioli was the only Italian who spoke English. The working procedure for OUATIA was for the Italian script to be translated into English and given to me. I would rewrite dialogue and make other suggesstion for cutting, change, and defining character; the script would be retranslated into Italian. This process was followed through five versions with supervision by Leone and input by the film's star, Robert De Niro. Writing took place in Los Angeles, Rome and New York. A final four-week session before shooting began was a line-by-line discussion of the English dialogue. Leone supervised this session."

The bolded section above suggests that Kaminsky actually contributed more than just writing the dialogue.

[dave jenkins]

I guess 75 is young in a world inhabited by Jenkins and CJ.

Actually, he was only 2 years older than my father. Sure seems like an early death to me.

This is doubly sad news. Early deaths are always so, but here was a man of genuine talent, not like usual crowd that gets obit-ed on this board. I'll admit that I have a soft spot for writers, and Kaminsky was, from all accounts, a writer's writer. Certainly his dialog for OUATIA will outlive us all.