Tom Cole, a playwright and screenwriter whose 1985 film “Smooth Talk” helped launch a teenage Laura Dern’s career, has died. He was 75.
Mr. Cole died Feb. 23 of multiple myeloma at his home in Roxbury, Conn., said his wife, Joyce Chopra, who directed “Smooth Talk.” The film won the grand jury prize at what is now the Sundance Film Festival.
He could write any character with great empathy, said Dern, who played the 15-year-old at the center of the film, and he brought “his characters to an urgently vivid reality … as if he had lived their lifetime.”
The film — based on the Joyce Carol Oates story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” — was about the sexual awakening of Dern’s conflicted teen, who is seduced by a foreboding stranger, played by Treat Williams.
“Things don’t explode; there are no car chases,” Cole told the Chicago Tribune in 1986 of the independent film. “We couldn’t have gotten money in Hollywood for it.”
While making the movie, Dern said she often could be found “talking to Tom, this 50-year-old male, Boston, MIT professor who could give me the insight as to what this teen girl was going through.”
One of his plays, “Medal of Honor Rag,” was based on the true story of a Vietnam War veteran who returned home a troubled hero. First staged in 1975, it often has been performed around the country; a 2005 Los Angeles production starred the rapper Heavy D.
