He was Lex Luthor to Christopher Reeve’s Superman. But could he have been Hannibal Lecter to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling?
The intriguing prospect is raised by an unlikely 33-page draft script for The Silence of the Lambs lurking in a collection of the late actor Gene Hackman’s possessions that goes up for auction later this month.
The sale of more than 400 items from the estate of Hackman – who won Oscars for his roles in The French Connection and Unforgiven – follows his death earlier this year at the age of 95 and contains more than one surprise.
The story of the partial script dates back to Hackman calling Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs “one of the most cinematic books I’ve ever read” and buying a share of the film rights. “Gene wanted to direct, and play Hannibal Lecter,” Harris’s agent, Robert Bookman, told Deadline in 2017.
Work on a screenplay was under way when Hackman suddenly got cold feet and abandoned the project, apparently because it was too dark. Bookman recalled: “Gene Hackman’s daughter read the book. And she called her father and said, ‘Daddy, you’re not making this movie.’”
The Silence of the Lambs was released in 1991, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Anthony Hopkins, and won all five of the top Oscars. Hackman’s first instinct had been on the money.
Anna Hicks, the head of private and iconic collections at Bonhams, says via Zoom from Los Angeles: “I guess he was the original person to latch on to the rights for that and try and make the movie. Then I found online that, basically, within his own circle people were like, ‘This is too creepy, don’t do it.’ It’s very interesting to see that he started that project but was like, OK, maybe not.”
In February, Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead inside their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Authorities determined that Hackman died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease about a week after Arakawa, 65, died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare disease spread by the droppings of infected rodents.
The Gene Hackman Collection: A Life in Art offers a poignant epilogue with annotated scripts, call sheets, posters and behind-the-scenes photos from films such as Mississippi Burning, Runaway Jury, Hoosiers, Unforgiven and Bonnie and Clyde. There are Golden Globe trophies as well as the Cecil B DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award complete with a handwritten acceptance speech. (The Academy does not allow the resale of Oscars.)
But perhaps the great revelation of the auction has nothing to do with the movies. When retired from acting in 2004, he left Hollywood for a somewhat secluded existence at the end of a cul-de-sac in a gated community in Santa Fe, exploring a rich and varied hinterland of writing novels, collecting art and painting pictures.
More than 70 of Hackman’s works are for sale and on display at Bonhams in Los Angeles. Hicks says: “He was quite a private person and it comes as a surprise to a lot of people. The first thing that everyone says is: This whole wall? He did all of this? When did he have the time?
“Within the Santa Fe community we’ve learned there were more people that knew he took art classes from some local artists who are selling some of the journals he had from those classes. Some of his teachers have given us nice quotes about working with him and how dedicated he was to mastering what he was trying to do.”
She adds: “To the global audience it’s an outlier. It’s not something anybody knew about him but it’s also cool to see behind the artist’s eyes instead of just in front of the camera.”
Among the items being auctioned are Hackman’s seascapes, still lifes and copies he painted of Henri Matisse’s Fruits and Bronze and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. He has a particular gift for portraiture, though buyers should not expect to find pictures of his film co-stars: most of the subjects are anonymous, implying his art was cordoned off from the Hollywood persona that defined his public life.
Hicks says he clearly studied hard and took his time. “We have books of sketches that show over this time period how he went along and became better and better at it. That’s one of his strongest areas of work. There are a lot of Santa Fe landscapes and still lifes as well but the portraiture is probably my favorite of all the things he did.”
Working in an artist’s studio, Hackman made a 14in-tall bronze bust of Arakawa, a classical pianist who was his wife for more than 30 years. The original signed plaster cast is included with the lot. Hicks explains: “We found a book from the studio that he worked in talking about it. He made the mould and somebody else helped him make the bronze. It’s beautiful.”
Hicks sees a clear dialogue between the Hackman’s art and the works he collected, particularly in the study of the human form and the use of colour. His taste spanned categories of postwar and contemporary art, western and Native American art, photography and prints.
In 1997 Hackman bought Figure on the Jetty by the American modernist Milton Avery. Depicting a lone figure on a jetty gazing out to sea, the painting is thought to be inspired by Avery’s summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1950s. It hung in Hackman’s personal library and is expected to fetch between $500,000 and $700,000.
Andrew Huber, Bonhams head of 20th and 21st century art, weighs in via Zoom from New York: “It’s exactly what you want from a Milton Avery. A good variance in the colour palette. It’s just before he had a medical issue that diminished him towards the end of his career. Great at-the-beach scenes of this scale and oil on canvas is something the market’s looking at, not just the American market but also internationally.”
Other notable works include Green, 1986 by Richard Diebenkorn, estimated at $300,000 to $500,000, a colour etching regarded as Diebenkorn’s most important print of his prominent Ocean Park series. There is a monumental bronze by Auguste Rodin, estimated at $200,000 to $300,000. The catalogue also includes a likeness of Hackman from portrait artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, who painted US presidents and drew for comic books.
Founded in 1793, Bonhams has previously handled the estates of celebrities including Lauren Bacall, Diahann Carroll, Siegfried and Roy and Roger Moore. The Hackman sales are structured into a live auction of 13 premier fine art pieces in New York on 19 November and two subsequent online sales. Listings start as low as $100 for Hackman’s everyman Winmau dart board or $600 for a shot at his Seiko diver’s wristwatch.
