Two-timer: Boston lawyer's affair with Thomas Crown

by Nancy Gaines

"I missed Boston," said Alan Trustman last Sunday, shortly after screening a preview of the much-ballyhooed remake of the movie he wrote, The Thomas Crown Affair. "I think the use of location fit with the story better in the first version. You know, I scouted all the locations for the original, down to the phone number in the phone booth at South Station in the scene with Yaphet Kotto."

Old Young Turk plays oldies for young Turks In the beginning, long before the term was coined, there were policy wonks. And they worked for Michael Dukakis. And perhaps the wonkiest of all among this group, which earnestly called itself the Young Turks, was Steve Kinzer. From his days as a high-school "radical" in Brookline to his stint as chief-of-staff in what became known as Duke I (the 1975-'79 gubernatorial stint), Kinzer was, well, the kind of guy who served bologna sandwiches, quartered, as hors d'oeuvres at a cocktail party. Brilliant. Lovable. But cool? These days, Kinzer is cool -- very cool. A foreign correspondent for the New York Times, currently bureau chief in Istanbul, Kinzer is also a DJ. And, if you believe him (which we always do), a wildly popular one. As he described in a recent Times dispatch, Kinzer hosts (for free) a Saturday-night blues show, called "Smokestack Lightnin'," on Istanbul radio. He speaks knowledgeably, and bilingually, about the artists he plays, including Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, and Mississippi John Hurt. "All those nights at Boston-area clubs and college auditoriums in the '60s turned out not to be so misspent after all," Kinzer wrote. Carlon gets credit Several hundred of the city's business-wired and politically connected bade farewell Monday night to American Express vice-president Don Carlon, who retired after 43 years with the company, the last dozen in charge of the New England area. "Don's certainly seen the highs and lows of our economy," said Pat Moscaritolo, head of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, which hosted the party along with the City of Boston and several industry groups. "He was with us through the recession in the early '90s, when you couldn't pay people to visit Boston, to today's boom times. And then there was the time some restaurant owners organized a boycott of AmEx -- he probably wished he could leave home without us." Carlon is replaced by Virginia Curnal, who was his assistant.

Trustman, now 68, was a young lawyer at the big Boston firm Nutter, McClennen & Fish when he penned a screenplay that became a 1968 four-star film showcasing Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, and the city. Trustman began confecting Thomas Crown on weekends in the mid '60s, after he became bored because his hero, football quarterback Y.A. Tittle, had retired from the New York Giants. So he spent his spare time penning a fantasy: how to rob the First National Bank of Boston. The remake of the stylish caper, due out this summer, was shot in New York, which, said Trustman, "didn't mean as much to the story as Boston did."

"But make no mistake, I'm a happy man," said Trustman, who got story credit (and, of course, money) for the remake, which stars Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan in "the best role ever he's done," according to Trustman. Plus, "I'm the only living writer to be remade," he said, noting that the other is Walter Hill, the director, who wrote both versions of The Getaway and was an assistant director on the first Thomas Crown. But The Getaway remake, in 1994, starring Alec Baldwin and wife Kim Basinger, was nothing compared to the 1972 version, starring McQueen and wife Ali MacGraw. "You run a huge risk with remakes," said Trustman, "because, even after 30 years, you have a core audience that wants to poke holes." But the new Thomas Crown "has its own magic," he said, adding that he "would have fought for" the more significant "screenplay" credit, "if I had seen the work print earlier, because most of the key lines are mine. But hell, the end product is a lot of magic and a lot of luck. All I do is the front end."

After creating Thomas Crown, Trustman went on to write Bullitt for McQueen (which, he said, the actor bought and starred in, "because I was his boy"), and 18 other produced screenplays. "None of which were remarkable," he said, except the sequel to In the Heat of the Night, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs. According to Boston friends and former colleagues, over the next few years Trustman "went Hollywood," although he didn't literally. "LA didn't like me because I never moved out there," he said. But others say LA just didn't like him, period. He left Boston in 1983.

These days, said Trustman, speaking from his summer house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, he divides his time between New York and Miami, "makes money" trading currencies, and writes "for fun." At the moment, he said, he has a script scheduled for production next year, called Our Man Ho, a fictional love story evoking the 1945-'53 period, when Indochinese and US spy interests coincided.

"Besides missing Boston," he said, harking back to his opinion of the remake, "I miss my song. You know, `The Windmills of My Mind.' I think of it as my song. To this day, when I go into a restaurant or place where they know me, they play it. But the movie's got a different theme this time around."