Peter Stone The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Peter Stone (February 27, 1930 -- April 26, 2003) wrote the screenplay for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), adapting John Godey's 1973 novel into a film that treated a subway hijacking as a workplace crisis laced with dry comedy. Stone was the first writer to win an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. He came to Pelham a decade after Charade had established him as Hollywood's most reliable writer of smart, literate thrillers.

Stone built his career on elegant adaptation and structural wit

Stone attended Bard College and the Yale School of Drama, then broke into television writing during the live-TV era of the 1950s. His first screenplay, Charade (1963), was rejected everywhere before Stanley Donen took it on.

"One, was he was the only person who hadn't seen it before and I felt silly selling it to the people who rejected it. Two, it got me out of New York, which at that point I wanted to... And three, Stanley got stars, and I had written with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in mind." — Peter Stone, The Script Righter

The film became the definitive Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made, and Universal immediately signed Stone for two more pictures: Mirage (1965) and Father Goose (1964). Father Goose won him the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, which he shared with Frank Tarloff. At the ceremony, Stone thanked the star rather than the Academy.

"Our thanks to Cary Grant, who keeps winning these things for other people." — Peter Stone, Academy Awards ceremony (1965) (imdb)

On Broadway, Stone wrote the book for 1776 (1969), Woman of the Year (1981), and Titanic (1997), winning Tony Awards for all three. He served as president of the Dramatists Guild from 1981 to 1999. His definition of the book writer's job was characteristically blunt.

"People don't know what a book is. They think it's the jokes. Well, everybody knows the actors make those up as they go along. A book is a concept and a structure, and dialogue is the smallest part." — Peter Stone, PBS American Masters

Stone's Pelham screenplay stripped the novel down to procedure and comedy

Godey's novel distributed its attention across backstories for the hijackers and their hostages, with interior monologues throughout. Stone cut all of that. He consolidated multiple police characters into Lt. Garber, tailoring the role to Walter Matthau's established screen persona of sardonic bureaucrats who solve problems through institutional competence rather than heroism. He gave the four hijackers color-coded aliases — Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Grey, Mr. Brown — replacing the novel's real names and creating a device that Quentin Tarantino would carry directly into Reservoir Dogs eighteen years later (see The Color-Coded Hijackers).

Tim Pelan, writing about Stone's transition from the elegant capers of the 1960s to the grittier register of 1970s New York, identified the shift precisely:

"The script was adapted by Peter Stone, who had written light, sub-Hitchcock frothy thrillers such as Charade and Arabesque for director Stanley Donen. Here, though, the humor is leavened with a drier, workaday wit, and is an intrinsic part of the drama." — Tim Pelan, Cinephilia & Beyond

Stone also added "The Gimmick" — a fictional override mechanism for the train's dead man's switch — so the film would not function as a realistic hijacking manual. The Transit Authority had refused to cooperate unless the production ensured the crime depicted on screen could not actually be replicated. Joseph Sargent accepted the modification without argument (see Production History (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)).

Stone's conviction that structure was everything — more important than dialogue, more important than character backstory — explains why the Pelham screenplay works as well as it does. He trusted Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, and Hector Elizondo to supply what the script deliberately withheld.

"You listen to the audience. The audience is wrong individually and always right collectively. If they don't laugh, it isn't funny. If they cough, it isn't interesting. If they walk out, you are in trouble." — Peter Stone, Variety (2003)

Stone received a Writers Guild of America nomination for Best Adapted Comedy Screenplay for Pelham. He died of pulmonary fibrosis on April 26, 2003, in Manhattan. (wikipedia)