Spider-Man screenwriter Alvin Sargent has passed away at the age of 92

Alvin Sargent, who penned the scripts for most of the live-action Spider-Man films has died at the senior age of 92.

Academy Award winning screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who was in charge of writing scripts for the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy released between 2002 and 2007, has died at the age of 92. He died of natural causes at his home in Seattle, Washington on Thursday, May 9. News of his death was brought to light by his friend and producer, Pam Williams. The headline was first reported by THR.

Born Alvin Supowitz in Apr. 12, 1927, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sargent graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1945 and, since 2006, he was one of 35 alumni to be marked as the school’s Wall of Fame.

At the age of 19, Sargent had served in the Navy for a brief period, during which he learned how to type (presumably when he honed most of his writing craft). He soon came to Hollywood with aspirations to become an actor. Although headshots were passed around, he did not have as much success he as hoped for. So he found other work, advertising for Variety.

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After about a decade, he left the paper business to pursue writing for television sometime in 1953.

He started out as a story editor on a show called Bus Stop but, according to the archives from Variety, he received earlier TV credits for other teleplays.

He wrote episodes for numerous TV shows, including Route 66, Ben Casey and Naked City, just to name a few. He co-wrote the Michael Caine-led comedy-thriller, Gambit, with Jack Davies and it ultimately became the screenplay that launched his big screen premiere.

Sargent gained wider recognition for such films as I Walk the Line and Paper Moon. However, it was the films Julia and Ordinary People in 1977 and 1980 respectively that earned him two Oscar wins for Best Adapted Screenplay.

During the ’80s, Sargent fell in love with and later married the late Laura Ziskin, who he would later collaborate with to make several films, such as What About Bob?, Hero and Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man sequels. In terms of his Spider-Man involvment, before production on Raimi’s Spider-Man began on Jan. 8, 2001, Ziskin hired Sargent to do an unaccredited polish on David Koepp’s draft of the script.

He then wrote the screenplays for Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3. Sadly, Ziskin passed away in 2011 due to complications from breast cancer. Her last contributions to the motion picture film industry were the franchise reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, in which Sargent handled a rewrite of James Vanderbilt’s script, and Lee Daniel’s The Butler.