00:00lawyer Alan Trustman wrote the script for the Thomas Crown Affair based on his own plans to
00:04rob the bank where he worked. He told Luxbeat Magazine that in the summer of 1955, he worked
00:10at the First National Bank of Boston. He daydreamed about the perfect heist to steal the Thursday
00:16evening cash transfer to the vault. Convinced it would work, but not terribly eager to go to federal
00:22prison, Trustman wrote out the plans in a story, then sold it to United Artists. Trustman also
00:28wrote another script that resulted in a second picture starring Steve McQueen, released just a
00:32few months after the Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. That movie was the action drama Bullet. Director
00:39Norman Jewison also used the Thomas Crown Affair as an opportunity to flex his creativity. He did so
00:45by collaborating with an impressive crew that included cinematographer Haskell Wexler, editor
00:50Hal Ashby, and title designer Pablo Faro, whose career skyrocketed after his title sequence on
00:56Dr. Strangelove in 1964. Their combined talents showcased an experimentation with split-screen
01:03editing. It allowed the director to display a series of different actions simultaneously on screen,
01:08which helped popularize a technique that's now become fairly standard. Coming up, an Argentinian
01:14heist film from writer-director Fabian Balinski, released in 2000. Nine Queens is next on Turner Classic
01:21movies. Next on TCM, Nine Queens, then F for Fake, and later, The Red House. Raise the roof with TCM
01:34Tonight.
