Wendell Mayes’ Bitter Break with Director Gower Champion over the 1974 Heist Comedy Bank Shot

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Wendell Mayes’ Bitter Break with Director Gower Champion over the 1974 Heist Comedy Bank Shot

Bank Shot (1974) — screenwriter Wendell Mayes and director Gower Champion / 1970s

The production of Bank Shot (1974), adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1972 Dortmunder novel, left a rare and public scar on the career relationship between veteran screenwriter Wendell Mayes and Broadway-to-Hollywood director Gower Champion. Mayes—who had set out to translate Westlake’s ‘slightly tilted’ comic tone to the screen—later stated that the picture failed because Champion attempted to remake the script into a broad farce. According to Mayes’ blunt recollection, Champion “was a nice guy and a marvelous stage director; but the film simply wasn't deft,” and the experience was, in Mayes’ words, the only bad experience he ever had with a director. That bitterness was not just private grievance: it framed how the film was remembered by insiders as a promising adaptation that misfired when its comic sensibility was altered in the director’s chair.