My favorite writer, in any medium or format, is Paddy Chayefsky. Two days ago would have been his 85th birthday, had he not died 27 years ago. Chayefsky made his famous guy bones in cinema, writing some of the most lauded screenplays ever, both rock solid character pieces and brain-frying epics of social import - a kooky mind with big, dangerous ideas, he was as at home riffing on metaphysical out-of-body experiences as he was lonely schlubs in the South Bronx. One such schlub, Marty Piletti, is the subject of his Hollywood breakthrough, Marty. I’d never seen Marty until tonight - a weak sort of tribute to one of my heroes on his born day - despite it being Chayefsky’s most fondly-remembered work. I’d read a volume of his plays (I have two more left) and wept at The Hospital and Network and marvelled at Altered States, three pieces that couldn’t be more different, or more indelibly filled with depth and feeling. Chayefsky isn’t necessarily like other favorites of mine; he makes me want to be better and quit fucking around, some others just make me agape. Chayefsky’s an inspirer, voracious and unflailing.

Marty doesn’t have that sociological swoop that his latter ’70s work has got and it’s probably more beloved because of it. But it is enormously tender in a way that isn’t cheap or fussy. One thing I notice about Chayefsky, perhaps moreso in Marty than elsewhere is a running theme: his empathy for and amusement from the elderly, especially the widowed. In Network, William Holden’s aging news producer shacks up with the fiercely younger and fiercely vacant Faye Dunaway. In The Hospital George C. Scott is a bundle of aged grief and loneliness, until love walks in (in the form of, again, a younger woman). In his play The Middle of the Night, The Manufacturer is also a widower who finds young love, maybe too young. And Marty’s mother and aunt are widows who can’t help but find the woes in old age and loneliness. In the case of Marty, the Bronx-based folksiness reminds me of my own sprawling family, a gang of Astoria, Queens residents who shifted to the suburbs without losing any of the affectations of native New Yorkers - territorial, tribal, fast but maybe not smart, warm-hearted. Marty’s mother is very much my grandmother, if less judgmental. The characters in Marty are so clearly autobiographical - Chayefsky was also a sweet, sharp, husky guy from the Bronx - and they makes me feel close to him. His eventual move to the land of big ideas makes me feel even better.