James Bridges
James Bridges (born February 3, 1936, Paris, Arkansas, U.S.—died June 6, 1993, Los Angeles, California) was an American actor, screenwriter, and director who was best known for The China Syndrome (1979) and Urban Cowboy (1980).
Bridges began his career in entertainment as an actor, and early credits included bit parts on a number of television shows and a starring role as Tarzan in Andy Warhol’s underground film Tarzan and Jane Regained…Sort of (1964). However, he eventually focused on working behind the camera. He wrote the well-received Marlon Brando vehicle The Appaloosa (1966), as well as numerous episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. In 1970 Bridges both scripted and directed The Baby Maker, a low-budget drama about a childless couple who hire a hippie (played by Barbara Hershey) to serve as a surrogate mother, with unexpected results.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
More widely seen was The Paper Chase (1973), a drama about a Harvard Law School freshman (Timothy Bottoms) who struggles to survive the rigours of his course work with the demanding Professor Kingsfield (John Houseman, who won an Academy Award for his role) while courting the professor’s free-spirited daughter (Lindsay Wagner). Bridges’s adaptation of the source novel was also Oscar-nominated, and the popular film was later adapted into a successful television series.
Bridges next wrote and directed 9/30/55 (1978; also known as September 30, 1955), a dramatization of a fan (Richard Thomas) struggling to come to grips with the death of idol James Dean in 1955. However, it was the suspenseful The China Syndrome (1979) that became Bridges’s first breakout hit. Jane Fonda played a television reporter who stumbles onto a cover-up at a nuclear power plant that nearly suffered a meltdown, and Jack Lemmon portrayed the engineer who blows the whistle on his criminally negligent superiors. Both actors were Oscar-nominated, as was Bridges for cowriting the prescient original screenplay. The film received an enormous boost when, a few weeks after it opened, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred in Pennsylvania.
Bridges also scored big with Urban Cowboy (1980), a formulaic but entertaining story about a young Texas construction worker (John Travolta) who lets his marriage to independent Sissy (Debra Winger) disintegrate while he struggles to be accepted in the world of Gilley’s, the famed Houston honky-tonk, with its mechanical bull and competitive dance floors. Cowritten by Bridges, Urban Cowboy was a box office hit and spawned a best-selling sound track. Bridges next wrote the existential murder mystery Mike’s Murder for his longtime friend Winger, but the studio rejected the cut he delivered in 1982, and the film remained on the shelf until 1984, when a much-edited version was released to critical and commercial failure.
Bridges’s next film, Perfect (1985), centred on the new subculture of health clubs. It starred Travolta as a bright but unscrupulous Rolling Stone reporter on the trail of a story and Jamie Lee Curtis as the club instructor he first exploits, then falls in love with. Perfect, which was coscripted by Bridges, was widely panned and failed to find an audience. In 1988 he helmed his last film, Bright Lights, Big City, an intelligent but curiously flat adaptation of the Jay McInerney best seller about the club-and-cocaine scene in 1980s New York City. Two years later Clint Eastwood directed White Hunter, Black Heart, which was based on a script cowritten by Bridges. Diagnosed with cancer, Bridges died in 1993. In 1999 the main screening venue of the UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media was renamed the James Bridges Theater.