Dennis Shryack, Screenwriter on Clint Eastwood's 'The
Gauntlet' and 'Pale Rider,' Dies at 80
By Mike Barnes, The Hollywood Reporter
The Minnesota native also penned the scripts for Tom Hanks'
'Turner & Hooch' and 'Code of Silence,' starring Chuck Norris.
Dennis Shryack, who wrote the screenplays for The Gauntlet
and Pale Rider, two films with plenty of action directed by and starring Clint
Eastwood, has died. He was 80.
Shryack, who helped attract $1 million for the script he
worked on for the Tom Hanks crime comedy Turner & Hooch (1989) — at the
time the most ever paid by Disney's Touchstone Pictures — died Wednesday of
congestive heart failure in Duluth, Minn., his daughter Jennifer said.
Pale Rider (1985) was the highest-grossing Western at the
box office to be released during the 1980s; it brought in $41 million (almost
$92 million today).
In addition to The Gauntlet (1977), Shryack also wrote the
Chuck Norris films Code of Silence (1985) and Hero and the Terror (1988);
Flashpoint (1984), starring Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams; Rent-a-Cop
(1987), toplined by Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli; and Cadence (1990),
directed by Martin Sheen and starring his son Charlie Scheen. Shryack's first
produced screenplay was for The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969), a comic
Western starring Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy, and he followed that with a
script for the thriller The Car (1977), with James Brolin.
In recent years, Shryack continued to write and spent long
afternoons fishing on the shores of Lake Superior. Survivors also include his
wife Kathy, his son Chris and Brothers Tom and Bill. He was represented by Nick Mechanic at The
Mechanic Co.
Thanks to Alwyn Peden and Davy Turner for informing me of
this sad news.
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