Good to see more and more screenwriters getting biographies and Silliphant deserved one - a big name in TV (he wrote truckloads of Naked City and Route 66 eps) as well as films, where his credits include In the Heat of the Night and lots of 70s disaster films. Segloff interviewed Silliphant for an installment of the excellent Backstory series of books and he's fleshed it out for a full length book.
I enjoyed reading this a lot - Silliphant had a hell of a career, working his way up from publicity flak to top screenwriter in Hollywood, and has a bunch of impressive credits (The Village of the Damned, Charly), as well as standard embarrassments all long term screenwriters enjoy (The Killer Elite, Over the Top). His personal life was full of incident and tragedy - several marriages, a son was murdered - and took many unusual detours - for instance, he was an early champion of Bruce Lee, was genuinely interested in South East Asia and tried to promote the Thai film industry.
There were two main drawbacks to the book for me - one, I would have preferred it had Segaloff analysed Silliphant's writing more. To be fair, he says upfront in the introduction he didn't want to do that, but I think was an opportunity missed - while Silliphant did a lot of hack-for-hire work, he also wrote plenty that went as intended to the screen (especially his early TV work and novels) and I would have liked to here Segaloff's take on his themes and so on. (Some of this is there - I just would have preferred more).
Secondly - and I'm being very blunt here - Silliphant was a bit of a dickhead. It's an extremely sympathetic biography and Silliphant is allowed to speak for himself extensively, but the more I got to know him, the less I liked him. Notwithstanding the tragedy of losing a child it's clear he was a lousy father, particularly to his daughter; he wasn't much as a husband either - he was closer to his last wife, but still ended up separated from her during the last few years of his life, living with mistresses; he idiotically refused cancer treatments which could have saved/prolonged his life because he didn't want to lose his sexual potency; he got hooked on big salaries and blew a lot of it; when he wrote something personal towards the end of his life, he wrote junky adventure novels (I think Silliphant's problem was he'd told all the personal stories he wanted to tell by the 60s after Route 66; then it was about getting hold of the money); he lacked a sense of humour (there are no comedies in the Sillphant canon).
Segaloff extensively quotes his last wife, Tiana, a lot and speaks highly of her, but she doesn't come out of this that great either, constantly whining that she didn't become a movie star.
Still, he was clearly a man of great talent whose achievements are worth recording and celebrating. Segaloff has done that here.
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