Darkly comic novelist and film writer
American novelist, playwright and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman has died aged 90. He was noted for his stories of modern angst.
His exuberant comedy, Stir Crazy, set mainly in prison and starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, became the third- highest- grossing U.S. film of 1980.
His 1984 Oscar-nominated Splash concerned a love affair between a man ( Tom Hanks) and a mermaid ( Daryl Hannah).
Friedman’s dark comedies played on the insecurities of white, male, middle- class, often Jewish subjects. He established a literary genre through the paperback Black Humor, which he edited in 1965; in it, he examined authors’ portrayals of horrific events in a comic manner.
Much of his fiction evolved from his own experiences.
He and his first wife, Ginger Howard, drove to Florida for their honeymoon in 1954. Both were exhausted, and while she fell asleep, he went to the pool. There he was attracted to a pretty young woman. When he told her he was “a little married” she splashed him. As a result he remained married, produced three sons, and only divorced in 1978.
From this came a short story, which was picked up by Neil Simon and turned into The Heartbreak Kid (1972), starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd.
Simon also turned Friedman’s non- fiction book, The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life, into the 1984 film The Lonely Guy, starring Steve Martin and Grodin. That contained classic Friedman humour, with ideas such as Grodin obtaining towels wholesale because they had the initials of couples who had divorced. Later Friedman wrote a non- fiction sequel, The Slightly Older Guy (1995).
Bruce Jay Friedman was born April 26, 1930 in the Bronx.
His Air Force commanding officer detected his promise as a writer. An upsetting experience became his story in The Man They Threw Out of Jets. This was published in The Antioch Review, while The New Yorker took another of his stories.
He spent a decade editing men’s adventure magazines. Having written his 1968 play Scuba Duba, Friedman would attend parties given by the mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo.
While editing, Friedman also wrote. In Steambath (1970), God is portrayed as a Puerto Rican towel attendant. He also continued to write fiction while working as a screenwriter.