Free Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God by Nat Segaloff

National Bank in Beverly Hills. This, despite pulling in $20,000 a month. Ever the optimist and self-assured as a writer, he needed work, and the Baum/Poitier connection was promising. Still, in Hollywood, you can die of encouragement. So he waited.

Silliphant produced The Joe Louis Story , a job that convinced him to become a writer.

Stirling and Margot Gohlke Silliphant at the June, 1970 premiere of A Walk in the Spring Rain. Stirling Rasmussen, nee Silliphant, stands at right.

Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter (circa 1970).

Tiana and her sister, Marian, are flanked by parents Anne (Hoang Thi Van Anh) and Patrick (Phouc Long Du).

Stirling and Tiana aboard the Royal Star liner in January of 1973. He was still married to Margot.

Stirling and Tiana apply for their marriage license in June, 1974.

Mr. and Mrs. Stirling Silliphant, July 4, 1974.

Tiana Alexandra resume photo.

Left to Right: Silliphant, Rod Steiger, Sidney Poitier, and producer Walter Mirisch backstage after the Oscars®, April 10, 1968. © Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Stirling and young Stirling Linh, circa 1978.

Stirling and his son, Stirling Linh, have a musical Christmas, 1986.

Stirling poses in his and Tiana’s home gymnasium.

Tiana brought Stirling to post-war Vietnam. The journey affirmed his belief in Buddhism, the wrongness of the war, and his doubts about America’s role in it.

Stirling Silliphant faces San Francisco Bay, the view from his home office in the mid-1970s in Marin County, Northern California.

Silliphant and writer David Morrell, who started as a fan and became a collaborator. Malibu, California, 1985.

The Silliphants visit General Vo Nguyen Giap and his family. The General led North Vietnam’s strategy and command during the war, and inspired Tiana’s later film, “Me & the General.”

Silliphant and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiatior to the Paris Peace Talks. When Tho and U.S. negotiator Henry Kissinger were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, he famously rejected it on the grounds that Kissinger had violated the peace.

Tiana, Stirling Lien, and two others at Silliphant’s Vietnamese gravesite, located after considerable difficulty.

13: The Agony and the Agony

    When Silliphant was hot, he was blazing hot, and in 1966 he got an idea to spread the wealth of his industry access to up-and-coming writers. He established Pingree Productions, not just as a personal loan-out company for his own work but as a place to nurture young scripters. By 1970 his plans were set to roll.
    “I had this idea of getting together some younger writers and directors and trying to find projects and raise the funding to let them make the kinds of films I wished I had made before I got parachuted into the Hollywood mainstream,” he explained. “I acquired the rights to Carlos Castanada’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Learning and made a [handshake] deal with [Avco-Embassy Pictures’] Joe Levine by which Joe was to give me $500,000 for my ‘guys’ to develop and to shoot The Teachings of Don Juan in 16mm for distribution in college towns only, four-wall deals where I planned to rent the theatres and to keep anyone out of the theatre who was any older than twenty-three. Can you believe the arrogance of that?” [253]
    In an era when police rioted against hippies on the Sunset Strip, rednecks beat up flower children, and Ohio National Guardsmen shot protesters, Silliphant’s embracing of America’s growing youth culture seemed strange to entrenched industry types. Unlike many Hollywood veterans, however, Silliphant did not view youths as competition but, rather, as a resource. Calling them “the most exciting aspect of the medium today” he saw video, rather than film, as a looming breakthrough. “Filmmakers will become overnight pop artists and millionaires,” he predicted in a guest column for Joyce Haber. “The variety of video programming will be expanded a thousand-fold and our