Ernest Thompson does not want to talk about ON GOLDEN POND. “It’s all old news and I’m, frankly, sick of talking about it,” he e-mails back to me when I propose writing about the film that won him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1982. The truth is I didn’t know much about Ernest Thompson other than that he was the screenwriter for the award winning film, and that he was from New Hampshire.
He still lives in the Granite State, at least part time, splitting the year between there and Los Angeles. “It’s nice to be close to the business,” he says about his home in Santa Monica, California, only a short walk to the Pacific Ocean. “Recreationally it’s a great place to live,” he says, but “I could take it or leave it.” You can take the boy out of New England, but you can’t take New England out of the boy. His tan skin and lean body are testament to the fact he maintains an active lifestyle, exercising often, while still keeping up on his writing. But he never set out to be a writer.
“After college, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do,” Thompson admits. He studied drama while moving from university to university during the “draft dodging years,” he says, and so acting seemed the most likely career choice. While attending American University in Washington, D.C., he heard about noted actor Cyril Ritchard casting for a play at nearby Catholic University. Thompson, realizing his chance to work with such an esteemed figure could help boost his novice image, immediately set out to become involved - except that he wasn’t enrolled at Catholic. Choosing to take one improv acting class there, he was able to audition and was cast as the lead. This was the first in an “extraordinarily lucky series of events,” explains Thompson.
He toured with a theater group and worked on a TV movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald in Savannah, Georgia. On the advice of a fellow actor, Thompson moved to Los Angeles for an audition. While he didn’t get the part, he did secure an agent and began auditioning for various other television series - even landing some roles over another actor, Harrison Ford.
Ernest Thompson, the actor, was probably best known for his stint as Ranger Matt Harper on NBC’s short-lived 1974 series, Sierra. “I was pretty lucky as an actor,” he says, but the work wasn’t steady. He was once quoted in Variety as saying: “I turned to writing after I got real familiar with the concept of unemployment.”
And now he admits that, “I think I was destined to be a writer.” Writing stories since he was a kid, Thompson even enjoyed writing book reports. Professionally though, “I tried to pass myself off as a television writer and failed miserably,” he admits. The producer of the NBC show Emergency told him to stick to acting, so he returned to theater because it’s what he knew best. “If I had been successful as a television writer, I probably would never have become a playwright,” explains Thompson.
Approaching his 28th birthday, Thompson looked back on his fledgling writing career and realized he needed to finish something. He would stay up all night, furiously writing, to accomplish this goal. He grouped three of his one-act plays into one entitled, “Answers,” and George Schaefer, the director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald TV movie, optioned it for $200 a month. Needing an agent, he landed Audrey Wood, who also represented Tennessee Williams. But Thompson and Woods’ relationship was strained - he didn’t like the formality of Wood as an agent, who only addressed him as “Mr. Thompson.” Eventually Thompson was let go from the agency.
After Thompson wrote the play, “On Golden Pond,” he stuffed it in a backpack and went to see another agent. When the agent asked if Thompson had anything to show, Thompson handed over the script. “Maybe a month after I wrote it, it was being produced off-Broadway,” says Thompson, still amazed that it happened the way it did. “I just wrote it,” he admits. There was no “master plan.”
In another of the lucky series of events, the play premiered at the Hudson Guild Theatre during the newspaper strike in the fall of 1978; the presses were halted so there couldn’t be any bad reviews of the show printed. And “On Golden Pond” became a sensation, selling-out even the standing room only section. The endearing story about Norman and Ethel Thayer, an elderly couple spending their 48th summer together in their vacation cottage, resonated with audiences. By the time the critics’ negative reviews came out, it was too late as the play had such positive momentum going that it transferred to the New Apollo on 42nd Street - the theater’s first production, and the on-Broadway premiere for Thompson’s play. The week before the production was to close, two producers, who knew Frances Sternhagen (playing the role of Ethel), saw the show and decided to re-open it the following year. The show went on.
Then came the movie version, shot entirely on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. It was produced with special dispensations from the Screen Actors Guild during an actors’ strike in Hollywood. It was the first time Jane Fonda and her father, Henry, worked on a movie together. The younger Fonda produced the film and was able to cast Katherine Hepburn as Ethel opposite Henry’s Norman - the first and last time the power duo would act together. Jane Fonda also played the Thayer’s daughter, Chelsea. The magical mix garnered the film ten Oscar nominations, winning three: Best Actor (Fonda), Best Actress (Hepburn) and Thompson’s coveted statuette.
“On Golden Pond” went on to be one of the most produced plays during the 1980s, playing in multiple languages across the globe, and is now being revamped into an all African-American version for the Kennedy Center with James Earl Jones.
“West Side Waltz,” Thompson’s next play after ON GOLDEN POND, starred Katherine Hepburn and had a two-year run, capitalizing on Hepburn’s drawing power. On the silver screen, Thompson tried directing a feature of his own script, 1969 and wrote the screenplay for SWEET HEARTS DANCE, another adaptation of one of his plays, but both movies found little success at the box office. His scribe hands have touched FORREST GUMP and CONTACT, but he dislikes rewriting other writers’ work. He directed a 2001 television version of ON GOLDEN POND and even more recently he wrote and co-starred in “The Penis Responds” on stage in New York, an obvious send-up of popular “The Vagina Monologues.”
Thompson has come to terms with himself as a writer. “I start with what I like as an audience member,” he says. “I don’t like to be talked down to [and] I tend to write intelligent characters.” Which is why most of his work is relationship and character driven. “I don’t know what else to write,” he explains, “it’s life.” And life goes on, sometimes, before our very eyes.
Having started his writing career over 25 years ago, he’s been able to see that “age-ism is not a myth.” There are studio execs that have never seen ON GOLDEN POND, let alone heard of it. It’s “strange to experience it in my lifetime,” admits Thompson. His craft has also changed whereas now he’s much more economical and he has adapted to the diminishing attention span of the MTV generation audiences.
But change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and more than anything, Thompson remains positive. “I don’t consider writing my job,” he says, “I consider it this fabulous summer camp activity” because he enjoys it so much. Perhaps it’s a summer camp on a lovely little pond in New Hampshire where we enjoy it too.