DETROIT - Monte Clark, who coached the Detroit Lions for seven seasons and was an assistant coach for Miami when the Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972, has died. He was 72.

The Lions say in a news release that Clark died Wednesday night of a bone marrow malignancy associated with lung and liver disease at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Clark coached Detroit from 1978-84 and compiled a 63-61-1 record in the regular season. He led the Lions to the playoffs in 1982-83, the first time the club made consecutive postseason appearances since its three straight playoff runs from 1952-54.

Survivors include Clark's wife of 52 years Charlotte, three sons and eight grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

Italian Job screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin dies aged 77;
Troy Kennedy Martin, screenwriter behind "The Italian Job"
as well as Z-Cars and Edge of Darkness on TV, dies of cancer ...
Guardian/UK
September 18, 2009

Troy Kennedy Martin, the screenwriter responsible for Edge of Darkness
and The Italian Job, died yesterday of liver cancer.

Kennedy Martin, 77, had a long career as a TV and film writer,
beginning in the late 1950s with his first TV play, Incident at Echo Six, for the BBC.

In the early 1960s he created the long-running BBC drama "Z-Cars",
which broke new ground in the degree of realism it brought to
the depiction of a northern police force at work.

Kennedy Martin moved into film writing with The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine, in 1967
and then Kelly's Heroes, a second world war action comedy featuring Clint Eastwood.

His later TV work included Reilly - Ace of Spies, for ITV; and Edge of Darkness,
the critically lauded 1985 BBC thriller starring Bob Peck as a policeman who becomes embroiled in an international conspiracy to convert nuclear waste into plutonium.

In 1962 Troy Kennedy Martin, who has died aged 77, created Z
Cars, writing the first nine episodes of the groundbreaking
realistic police series and returning in 1978 to polish off
the last one. In 1969 he scripted The Italian Job, which
remains one of the most popular British movies of all time.
At a screening years later, he observed the audience joining
Michael Caine in yelling out the familiar lines such as
"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" Both of
these works are regarded as major events in screen history.
Innovative and influential, Kennedy Martin showed that
quality drama could be accessible. His nuclear thriller,
Edge of Darkness (1985), one of the key television works of
the decade, was repeated on BBC1 a mere 10 days after the
final episode had been transmitted on BBC2. His ITV
production Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983) was also highly
praised and was one of several works screened at his 2006
British Film Institute retrospective.

Kennedy Martin was born on the Isle of Bute, off the west
coast of Scotland. His father was an engineer and his mother
a teacher. Moving frequently because of the second world war
and his father's work, his was a talented and creative
family. His younger brother, Ian, is also a scriptwriter,
the creator of two other police series, Juliet Bravo and The
Sweeney, as well as many other works including the recent
critically acclaimed play Berlin Hanover Express. Their
surviving sister, Mo, was a member of the folk group the
Tinkers.

The family established themselves in north London, only to
have the household income, never large, halved by the death
of Troy's mother when he was 15. The Catholic church helped
to keep them afloat, and Troy went to Finchley Catholic
grammar school, followed by Trinity College Dublin.

According to Ian: "Troy's first plan after national service
would have been the Foreign Office, but he did not have the
right background. He must have picked up the idea that a
slim volume of poetry or novel would get him in." A novel
was in fact written, Beat on a Damask Drum (1959), but this
was not what kickstarted his career. "Troy wrote an article
about boy soldiers in Cyprus and the BBC asked him to come
in and talk about turning it into a play," his brother
recalled.

Based on his own experiences during national service as an
officer with the Gordon Highlanders, this became the
television play Incident at Echo 6, screened in 1958. It
began a long CV which is about to become even longer with
the release in January of the Mel Gibson film version of
Edge of Darkness. Although Kennedy Martin did not work on
the movie, it is based on his television series and has the
same director, Martin Campbell.


Other films included Kelly's Heroes (1970), Red Heat (1988),
Hostile Waters (1997) and Red Dust (2004). Two of his
Wednesday Plays went out in 1965 and a five-part adaptation
of Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo was transmitted in
1983. He also wrote episodes of many series such as Redcap
and The Sweeney, as well as the film Sweeney 2 (1978). Two
further scripts remain unfilmed: Troppo, a South Seas
environmental thriller, and Ferrari, which captured the life
of the motor racing champion Enzo Ferrari.

"Very often he wrote 'spec' - uncommissioned - scripts,"
recalls his agent, Elaine Steel. "With Edge of Darkness, the
BBC didn't know what they were getting. It started out as a
thing about the Knights Templar. When he was talking to
aspiring film writers, he would say that you shouldn't write
to a formula. You should start writing where you felt like
writing, and that might mean starting in the middle of the
script, as he sometimes did."

His work was powerfully - but not overtly - political. He
was not agitprop. He joined the Labour party and went on
anti-war marches. He was critical of the bureaucratic
direction he felt the BBC had taken over the last 30 years.
At a meeting during which the then director general, John
Birt, asked a gathering of scriptwriters for their thoughts,
he showed that, however affable in person he was, it was
just as well that he had not taken up diplomacy as the day
job. "Well, you see John, actually you're a Leninist," he
informed Birt. "You've replaced a rigid and uncreative
bureaucracy with an even more rigid and less creative
bureaucracy." Oddly enough, this did not torpedo his BBC
career.

A talented, generous and agreeable man, he was dedicated to
his work. He married the Z Cars cast member Diane Aubrey in
1967 and remained devoted to their two children after their
divorce. He moved out of the flat in Notting Hill, west
London, where he had lived during most of his career, and
spent his last two years in Ditchling, West Sussex, after
Luke Holland's television series A Very English Village had
alerted Kennedy Martin to the attractions of the area. Had
it not been for his sudden illness, he would have been
speaking to the local film society at its forthcoming 40th
anniversary screening of The Italian Job (he had no
connection with the less iconic remake of 2003, starring
Mark Wahlberg).

He is survived by his children Sophie and Matthew, his
grandchildren Tomas and Ella, his brother Ian and his sister
Maureen.

John Caughie writes: Troy Kennedy Martin's death is a
reminder of the importance of a tradition of popular and
risky television drama over the last 50 years. From his
six-part anthology Storyboard (1961), produced by his
co-conspirator James MacTaggart, Troy's aim was "to tell a
story in visual terms", breaking free of a theatrical
naturalism in which stories were told by actors talking
while the camera looked on. "We were going to destroy
naturalism, if possible, before Christmas." His article for
Encore in 1964, Nats Go Home!, was a manifesto for a
television drama that mattered, experimented, and aspired to
be bigger than the box that contained it.

The creative edginess of Edge of Darkness lies in a
narrative in which something real is at stake; a script that
takes risks with credulity; performances and a visual style
that keep faith with the risks; and an ethical seriousness
that inscribes what is at stake on the emotions. The sheer
volume and availability of television invite formulae and
familiarity. It requires a rogue imagination to shake the
routines loose, and Troy provided that kind of imagination.
Edge of Darkness embodies an avant-garde sensibility in a
popular thriller, stretching the conventions without quite
breaking them, and pushing on the boundaries of what popular
television can do.

Just before his diagnosis with a brain tumour and lung
cancer, Troy delivered four feature-length scripts for the
global warming thriller Broken Light, inspired by James
Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia.