His death was announced by the Writers Guild of America, West, which Mr. Pierson twice served as president. He was also president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2001 to 2005.

Mr. Pierson had been working as a correspondent for Time and Life magazines in the 1950s when he decided to try screenwriting. By 1958, he had quit journalism and sold his first script to the half-hour anthology show "Alcoa-Goodyear Theater." He was soon writing and directing full time for film and television, beginning with the 1962 television series "Have Gun — Will Travel."

He was nominated for Academy Awards for "Cat Ballou" (1965), a high-spirited Western with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, and the chain-gang drama "Cool Hand Luke" (1967), with Paul Newman. He won, for original screenplay, for "Dog Day Afternoon," directed by Sidney Lumet and released in 1975.

Mr. Pierson said he struggled mightily with that script — and he later used his struggle as a teaching tool. He told students that he had been unable to capture the essence of the central character, the leader of an inept gang of bank robbers who winds up taking hostages.

He broke through after concluding that the thief, based on a real-life robber and played by Al Pacino, was a pleaser, someone trying in his flawed way to make others happy.

"I've never heard anyone speak of their own work more dispassionately and more usefully," said Howard A. Rodman, the vice president of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Part of Mr. Pierson's legacy is a single irresistible line from "Cool Hand Luke." "What we've got here," a prison warden (Strother Martin) says to the inmate Luke (Mr. Newman), "is failure to communicate."

Luke later uses the line himself, and it has been repeated and remixed in popular culture ever since. The American Film Institute ranked it in 2005 as the 11th-best movie quote of all time.

Frank Romer Pierson was born in Chappaqua, N.Y., on May 12, 1925. When he was 18, his mother, Louise Randall Pierson, wrote a best-selling book based on their family life, "Roughly Speaking," which was made into a movie of the same name in 1945. The story includes the tales of three sons who enlist to fight in World War II, one of them modeled after Frank.

After serving in the Pacific, Mr. Pierson graduated from Harvard with a degree in cultural anthropology.

His survivors include his wife, Helene; a daughter, Eve; a son, Michael; and five grandchildren.

In recent years Mr. Pierson was a consulting producer of the TV series "Mad Men" and "The Good Wife."

Mr. Pierson was a devoted mentor. In the 1980s, he was a founding writer at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, where he was known for rigor, frankness and more than one epiphany after eventually seeing merit in a work of which he had at first been wary.

"We all learned from Frank," Michelle Satter, the founding director of Sundance's feature film program, wrote on the Sundance Web site on Monday, "and when he spoke, it always got very quiet in the room."