John Hill was an American screenwriter and television producer. He was originally from Prairie Village, Kansas. He got his start in Hollywood when he penned the 1976 TV movie Griffin and Phoenix, starring Peter Falk and Jill Clayburgh. The original title was The fading away of Griffin and Phoenix. ABC thought that too morbid, so he had to change it. In 1980 his film Heartbeeps was released, starring Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters. He was also commissioned to novelize both scripts (the first appearing under the TV movie's original title, Griffin Loves Phoenix), exercising his contractual first-refusal right to do the prose adaptations himself; and years later, in personal conversation with a colleague who knew of the books, Hill confessed that he loved working on them because "they taug