In 2004, The New York Times placed the film on its list of The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.īoth Thomas Crown and Bullitt have iconic scenes, Thomas Crown the erotic chess game between McQueen and Dunaway culminating in one of moviedom’s longest kisses. It grossed a then impressive $62 million.

The success of The Thomas Crown Affair was followed by another McQueen movie, Bullitt, which Trustman wrote in 20 hours.

McQueen loved the rewrite, and told everyone 'I don’t know how but the son of a bitch knows me.' Trustman felt the script had to be rewritten for McQueen and spent a week of 16-hour days at United Artists in New York screening film on McQueen and making lists of what McQueen liked, didn't like, did well, and could not do.

Trustman had written the script for Sean Connery but producer Walter Mirisch and director Norman Jewison cast Steve McQueen, who had been pursuing the role, the first in which he plays against his usual blue-collar man of action persona. The initial screenplay took 30 days to write. Insurance adjuster Faye Dunaway figures out who is responsible for the crime but falls in love with the miscreant. His law office overlooked the First National Bank of Boston, where he had worked during the summer of 1954, and his knowledge of the bank procedures led to the movie about a millionaire businessman who commits a perfect crime, a robbery by five men who do not know each other and never meet until the robbery, in which each has a separate role. In 1967, Trustman wrote his first screenplay, The Thomas Crown Affair. Gus Alexander, a partner at the firm, best remembers him for achieving partnership in only six years and then retiring on full pension only six years after that at the age of 37. He developed shopping centers and bought and sold businesses in competition with the major New York law firms. He attended the Boston Latin School, then The Phillips Exeter Academy where he was first in his 1948 class, and then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1952 and Harvard Law School in 1955.Īfter college, he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar and went to work at the Boston law firm Nutter, McClennen & Fish where his father, Benjamin A Trustman, was also a partner. Trustman was born Decemin Boston, Massachusetts.

Silver Dollar by Alan Trustman