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Alan Sharp (12 January 1934 – 8 February 2013) was a Scottish novelist and screenwriter. He published two novels in the 1960s, and subsequently wrote the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States.
According to one obituary, "his best-known narratives created and then disassembled audience expectations about all the usual Hollywood verities, especially the triumph of justice, love and friendship."
Alan left school at 14 to apprentice in the yards, the first of a long series of odd jobs. He also worked as assistant to a private detective, as an English teacher in Germany, construction laborer, dishwasher, night switchboard operator for a burglar alarm firm, packer for a carpet company, and had a role at IBM. From 1952 to 1954, he did his National Service.
When he left the army he returned to Greenock, got married and intended to train as a teacher. However, when his college grant arrived, he gave the money to his wife and left for Germany. He then relocated to London with the intention of becoming a writer.
His first novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, was published in 1965 to acclaim and won the 1967 Scottish Arts Council Award. It was banned in Edinburgh's public libraries for a time due to its sexual content.
It was the first part of a proposed trilogy, and Sharp published the second novel, The Wind Shifts, in 1967. The third novel, which had the working title The Apple Pickers, No free online access. This obituary claims that Sharp's unfinished novel was titled "Don't Cry, It's Only a Picture Show. was left incomplete when Sharp emigrated to Hollywood and focused on screenwriting.
Sharp married for a second time and also had a relationship with the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, with whom he had a daughter, Ruth. Bainbridge later said, "He showed up for Rudi's birth, but then went downstairs saying he was going to get a book out of the car and never came back."
He wrote The Last Run, which he called "an attempt to use the melodramatic crime chase to deal with whatever the hero's preoccupations might be." He then wrote a series of Westerns, such as Ulzana's Raid and Billy Two Hats. He called Night Moves "an attempt to use the classic detective format, the private eye, and then set him in a landscape in which he was unable to solve the case."
He lived for a number of years in New Zealand on Kawau Island, but moved back to Scotland in 2000. In 1996, Peter Broughan announced that he and Sharp would be making two further feature films together, Vain Glory about Christopher Marlowe and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; neither was made. Nor was a film Sharp wrote about Scottish poet Robert Burns.
A second daughter, Rachel Minnie Sharp, also briefly an actress, was married to Luke Perry.
Sharp was survived by his fourth wife, Harriet Sharp, and a total of six children, two stepsons and 14 grandchildren, including professional wrestler Jack Perry.
In the 1970s, six of Sharp's screenplays became high-profile Hollywood feature films, most of them dealing with quintessentially American themes and characters. Walter Chaw writes of Sharp's screenplays from this period, "On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana's Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp's screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom."
Trevor Johnston has written that "There's an argument to suggest that a certain seventysomething Scot could well be Britain's greatest living screenwriter. Much is made of pre- Star Wars '70s Hollywood as a kind of celluloid golden age, and Alan Sharp was there in the thick of it, working with the very best, generating the sort of track record few British screenwriters are likely to match." Trevor Johnston is a film critic for Time Out London. His article is a detailed appreciation of Sharp's adaptation of Lord Dunsany's 1936 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, for the film Dean Spanley (2008).
David N. Meyer has incorporated an appreciation of Sharp's writing in his review of Night Moves (directed by Arthur Penn in 1975). Following a description of an important seduction scene from the film, Meyer adds: "These delicious, poisonous moments – these cookies full of arsenic – come courtesy of Alan Sharp's venomous, entrapping, perfectly circular screenplay. It's hard not to regard him – rather than Penn – as the engine of Night Moves' enduring power. Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television."
Quentin Curtis called the screenplay for Rob Roy "one of the best screenplays in the last decade".
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