‘The Candidate’ Screenwriter Was 88

Jeremy Larner, whose experience as a speechwriter for 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy informed his Oscar-winning screenplay for the Robert Redford-starring The Candidate, has died. He was 88.

Larner had been ill for some time and died Feb. 24 in a nursing facility in Oakland, California, his son Jesse Larner told The Hollywood Reporter.

For his only other produced screenplay, Larner adapted his 1964 novel Drive, He Said, for the audacious basketball-centric 1971 film of the same name that marked the feature directorial debut of Jack Nicholson.

Larner had joined McCarthy on the campaign trail in March 1968, with the Minnesota senator, running on a platform to end the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, attempting to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

McCarthy appeared on his way to victory, but following the withdrawal of President Lyndon Johnson from the race and the assassination of fellow candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the nomination would go to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

After writing Nobody Knows: Reflections on the McCarthy Campaign of 1968, a book that gained traction when it was serialized in Harper’s magazine in 1969, Larner was approached by Redford and director Michael Ritchie to write the script for The Candidate (1972).

In the Warner Bros. film, Redford stars as idealistic young liberal Bill McKay, a poverty lawyer and son of a wheeling-dealing governor (Melvyn Douglas) who is groomed by a political consultant (Peter Boyle) to run against Republican incumbent Crocker Jarman (Don Porter) for senator in California.

McKay speaks his mind, figuring he has no chance of winning — until he does, prompting him at the end to ask Boyle’s Marvin Lucas, “What do we do now?”

Redford and Ritchie “had a few ideas of what they wanted it to be about, and of the ending as well,” Larner recalled in an extensive 2016 Brooklyn Magazine interview with Steve Macfarlane about his work on the film. “One of the reasons they approached me was, I was one of the very few writers who had written speeches for a presidential campaign, and a screenwriter at the time as well.

“Here’s what I said the first time I met with [them]: I said, to me, a politician was like a movie star. He could lose himself in a character — it’s true of many stars, and was even truer then — who resembles himself, only larger than life, as a symbol of what’s beautiful and what’s true. I was aware, of course, that Redford was that kind of a symbol. As I said this, I thought to myself: ‘You are now definitely losing the job.’

“This is where my experience with McCarthy came into it: I would write a speech, hear McCarthy deliver my words as part of his stump speech, and see the response he got from it. He’d say things that enabled people to cheer themselves by cheering him.

“I thought a campaign was like drifting downriver on a raft, where everything is beautiful: then you begin to hear the roar of the falls up ahead, but it’s too late. You go over the falls, you lose yourself, you become eternally confused by the difference between yourself and who your public thinks you are. And it’s a disarming, dissociative experience. And Redford played that very well: the better McKay gets at campaigning, the more he loses himself.”

Jeremy David Larner was born on March 20, 1937, and raised in Indianapolis, where he won the city’s high school tennis championship while attending Shortridge High. His father, Martin, was president of the Jewish Community Center Association.

Larner graduated from Brandeis University in 1958, where his classmates included soon-to-be activist Abbie Hoffman, then attended the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.

He moved to New York when he was 22 and stayed throughout the 1960s, working as a freelance journalist for such publications as Life — for whom he covered the 1968 Mexico City Olympics — The New Republic and Harper’s.

Larner also authored two novels and three nonfiction books during this period, including Poverty: Views From the Left; Drive, He Said; The Addict in the Street; and the LSD-centric The Answer.

During the McCarthy campaign, Larner penned a radio commercial for Paul Newman that played in Indiana, and he ghost-wrote a magazine article for the actor talking about why he was impressed with the senator.

Larner’s Drive, He Said novel revolved around two Ohio University roommates, one an alienated basketball star (played by William Tepper in the film) and the other a revolutionary (Michael Margotta). Its title is taken from a quote from the Robert Creeley poem I Know a Man. 

In 1968, Nicholson phoned Larner and said, “Jer, I’m gonna be a star, and they’re gonna let me direct a picture. I want you to come out and write it,” he told Los Angeles Magazine in 1996. So Larner left Boston — he was working at Harvard at the time — to come to L.A.

Larner said he wrote the first draft of Drive, He Said and then rewrote Nicholson’s rewrite. (Also contributing to the script: Terrence Malick and Robert Towne, both uncredited.)

By the time production had wrapped on the R-rated film — it was dismissed at Cannes and played mere weeks in theaters before being pulled — Nicholson was indeed a star with Easy Rider in his pocket, and Larner had returned to Harvard before The Candidate opportunity arose.

“I came down to New York,” he told Macfarlane. “Redford and Ritchie saw 10 different writers with experience on political movies, or with experience as speechwriters. I figured I would not get the job, especially because I had kind of long hair and a beard at the time [Laughs]. But I figured I was free to say what I wanted to say, and to my surprise they called me back.

“Then they came up to Cambridge … and we worked mostly in my kitchen — I think we went out to dinner a couple times. We worked out the nature of the story, and I told them stories of my experience with McCarthy, some of which I put directly in the script. For example, the moment when somebody hands McKay a Coke and a hot dog, so his hands are occupied, and then slugs him in the face — that really happened to McCarthy!”

For additional research, Larner spent a week with Democratic Sen. John V. Tunney, who had recently been elected a California senator. One of Tunney’s lines — “I have a confession to make: I ate all the shrimp” — made it into his script.

Given a month to write the screenplay, Larner said it took him two weeks, working from noon to 3 a.m. very day to come up with 180 pages. Then, he was on set of the $1.1 million picture every day, rewriting constantly.

“I’m a little surprised the ending worked out OK — more than OK, he said. “That line, ‘What do we do now?,’ is probably not something a real politician would say. They think they know what they’re doing as a rule, even when they don’t!”

On Oscar night in 1973, Larner in his acceptance speech thanked “the political figures of our time who’ve given me terrific inspiration. I think as long as they continue to do the things they do and to use the words that they use, words like ‘honor,’ there’ll be better pictures and sharper pictures even than The Candidate.”

Larner went on to write about a dozen screenplays but never had another onscreen writing credit. “I was much better paid for them and I thought some of them were far better than The Candidate, but I could never get any of them made,” he said. Those included several drafts of North Dallas Forty (1979) and an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Victory for Sydney Pollack.

“I thought I was the exception to the rule in terms of writers having clout, but writers don’t have any clout unless they get to be Paddy Chayefsky,” he said. He did pen environmental speeches for Redford, speak on college campuses and write Chicken on Church & Other Poems, published in 2006.

Survivors include his sons, Jesse and Zachary, and his brother, Daniel. He was married to Brandeis classmate Susan Berlin from 1960 until their 1968 divorce.

In his interview with Macfarlane, Larner said that during the making of The Candidate, many people working on the film didn’t understand his script, and he noted he was “constantly explaining myself.”

“It made sense to Redford and Ritchie, I always thought, but then again I was always reminding them of where the scenes fit together, and it was a constant concern of theirs to make sure the scenes did,” he recalled.

“But the idea for the movie predated the script. When Redford and Ritchie approached me, McKay would be the son of a former governor, trapped into an uncomfortable position, and surprised when he wins. Kind of like me winning the Oscar.”