Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Jeremy Larner Dies at 88 in Oakland

Jeremy Larner, the Oscar-winning screenwriter whose experience as a speechwriter for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy informed his acclaimed script for “The Candidate,” died Feb. 24 in a nursing facility in Oakland, according to his son Jesse Larner. He was 88.

Larner had been ill for some time, his son told The Hollywood Reporter.

The screenwriter won his Academy Award for “The Candidate” (1972), the Warner Bros. political drama starring Robert Redford as Bill McKay, an idealistic young liberal who runs for U.S. Senate in California. In the film, McKay is a poverty lawyer and son of a wheeling-dealing governor who gets groomed by a political consultant to challenge a Republican incumbent.

Larner’s real-world political experience directly shaped the screenplay. He joined Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in March 1968, according to the source. McCarthy ran on a platform to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War while seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

Though McCarthy initially appeared headed for victory, the nomination ultimately went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey following President Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race and the assassination of fellow candidate Robert F. Kennedy, according to reports.

After the campaign, Larner wrote “Nobody Knows: Reflections on the McCarthy Campaign of 1968,” a book that gained attention when Harper’s magazine serialized it in 1969. This work led Redford and director Michael Ritchie to approach Larner about writing “The Candidate.”

“One of the reasons they approached me was, I was one of the very few writers who had written speeches for a presidential campaign, and a screenwriter at the time as well,” Larner said in a 2016 Brooklyn Magazine interview.

Larner drew parallels between politicians and movie stars in developing the screenplay’s themes. “I said, to me, a politician was like a movie star. He could lose himself in a character — it’s true of many stars, and was even truer then — who resembles himself, only larger than life, as a symbol of what’s beautiful and what’s true,” he told the magazine.

The screenwriter described his campaign experience as crucial to understanding political transformation. “I would write a speech, hear McCarthy deliver my words as part of his stump speech, and see the response he got from it,” he explained in the interview. “He’d say things that enabled people to cheer themselves by cheering him.”

Beyond “The Candidate,” Larner adapted his 1964 novel “Drive, He Said” for the 1971 basketball-centered film that marked Jack Nicholson’s feature directorial debut.

Jeremy David Larner was born March 20, 1937, and raised in Indianapolis, where he won the city’s high school tennis championship while attending Shortridge High, according to reports. His father, Martin, served as president of the Jewish Community Center Association.

Larner graduated from Brandeis University in 1958, where his classmates included future activist Abbie Hoffman. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.

Moving to New York at age 22, Larner spent the 1960s working as a freelance journalist for publications including Life magazine, for whom he covered the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, The New Republic and Harper’s.

The film’s ending, where Redford’s victorious candidate asks “What do we do now?” captured Larner’s view of political campaigns as transformative experiences that can leave candidates confused about their identity versus public perception.