Bill Kerby, the maverick screenwriter who wrote the first draft of the Bette Midler-starring rock drama The Rose and worked on The Last American Hero, The Gravy Train and Hooper as well, has died. He was 88.
Kerby died Aug. 13 on Whidbey Island in Washington state, producer John Ptak, his longtime agent, told The Hollywood Reporter. He had been in hospice care at home but had fallen and suffered a fracture, he added.
A full-time writer in Hollywood for 30 years, Kerby received an Emmy nomination and a WGA award for penning the three-part 2012 miniseries Hatfields and the McCoys, which starred Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton and was a huge ratings success for the History channel.
He had started on the project for producer Leslie Greif at CBS in the 1980s, and it would turn out to be his last credit.
In 1973, Kerby had written reviews of rock concerts and interviewed musicians when was hired by producer Marvin Worth, who had a deal at 20th Century Fox, to write a rock movie, “one loosely based on Janis Joplin, a female singer, rise and fall, live the life, die the death,” he recalled in an entertaining 1980 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation. “I was even more of a nobody then than I am now, but they made me a deal.”
