Every afternoon at 4:30 p.m., Frank Elli returned to his cell at the maximum-security Stillwater prison. Aside from supper, he spent his evenings pecking away on a 30-year-old typewriter.
During the early 1960s, Elli was serving a 10-to-80-year sentence for armed robbery and aggravated assault. His haven from the confines of the state penitentiary was a novel he wrote called “The Riot,” which he based on an actual prison riot he experienced while serving time in Washington. A University of Minnesota professor named Harold Alford mentored Elli as he completed the manuscript.
Courtesy of University of Minnesota Libraries
Elli’s novel tells the story of a man named Cully Briston who found himself in the middle of a two-day inmate takeover of a prison. Briston hadn’t organized the takeover, but he participated out of a sense of inmate solidarity and self-preservation. One of the more levelheaded inmates, Briston became a spokesman for the rioters, who held several prison officials as hostages. He was terrified by what a semblance of freedom did to his fellow inmates, who spent their time making and consuming homemade liquor and deciding whether to kill the hostages.
In the end, Briston helps the most hated guard in the prison escape murder by the inmates and negotiates an end to the takeover. Briston’s actions keep his fellow inmates from earning life sentences for homicide, but he pays for his decision with a brutal beating.
“The Riot” went on to become one of the most acclaimed and popular novels of the late 1960s, and major Hollywood studios got into a bidding war over the film rights. “Riot,” a film based on Elli’s book, was released by Paramount Pictures in 1969, starring Jim Brown and Gene Hackman and directed by Buzz Kulik.
The roots of this unlikely bestseller began decades earlier in the Twin Cities. Frank Michael Elli was born on April 9, 1925, in St. Paul. He was the son of Michael Elli and Anna (Christi) Elli. He had two older sisters, one of whom died as a toddler. The Elli family lived in Chicago when Frank was a young child, where his father drove a taxi. Michael left the family when Frank was 5 years old and his mother returned to her native St. Paul, raising her children with relatives. Frank attended primary school and church at St. Bernard’s in St. Paul’s North End, where he served as an altar boy. He attended Washington High School, where he started skipping classes and struggled academically, but he managed to graduate in 1943. Interestingly, English and writing were among his weakest subjects.
Courtesy of Picryl
Elli enlisted in the Navy two days after graduation. By his own account, he “spent three years on a ship,” where he developed a serious drinking problem. Beyond receiving an honorable discharge in 1946, records of his World War II-era military service are scant. After mustering out of the Navy, Elli returned to St. Paul, where he attended business college for a few weeks.
Bored of school, Elli hitchhiked to southern California. He planned to enlist in the Merchant Marines, but a seaman’s strike had shut down the ports of the west coast. Instead, he took some odd jobs, did a lot of drinking, and befriended an ex-con from Texas, and made the fateful decision to accompany his new friend on a drive back east in a stolen car. Law enforcement caught up with the pair in Salt Lake City, Utah, and extradited him to California, where he was convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 90 days in prison. This proved to be the first of Elli’s 11 felony convictions over the next 20 years. Between 1946 and 1966, he was a free man for less than three years.
“I don’t know how it happened. I had no goal. Nothing had any meaning for me. After the first time in prison, I got the feeling I couldn’t get along on the outside,” Elli said in a 1966 interview with the Associated Press.
When Elli got out of jail for the first time, he stayed in California and fell into a pattern of getting drunk and committing burglaries of the bars or liquor stores he patronized. At one point, he spent six months in a Mexican prison before being promptly deported after an assault conviction. A 1951 conviction for a burglary in San Diego netted him three years in the famed San Quentin State Prison (now the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center).
The day he got out of San Quentin, he ripped up his parole papers and took a bus to Washington with plans to work in a logging camp. Instead, he fell back into his old habits. He was convicted of a burglary in Seattle and sent to Washington State Penitentiary, otherwise known as “Walla Walla.”
Elli got much of the material for “The Riot” in this facility. One morning, he scaled the prison’s walls with other inmates. He was on the loose for 20 minutes—the escape earned him an extra year in prison.
“The riot took place toward the end of my time [in Walla Walla], and it was the one that I had in mind when I wrote the book. It involved most of the guys that I knew when I was in and out of the hole,” Elli wrote in his autobiography. He had not been a major participant in the riot but aided the inmates involved by grabbing some sledgehammers for them from the workshop.
“There were 1,700 men in the prison actually, and maybe 200 were out and running around and drunk on this raisin jack (a form of homemade liquor) and these other things. The majority stayed right in their cells,” Elli told radio legend Studs Terkel in a 1968 interview. The two-day riot later served as the basis for his book, and he received an additional four months for his involvement. In total, Elli served nearly five years at Walla Walla.
Upon his release in 1956, Washington’s state parole board allowed him to return to Minnesota. Back in St. Paul, Elli was soon up to his old antics, getting drunk and breaking into bars. He was in and out of jail for a couple of years before getting into serious trouble.
In February 1958, Elli escaped from the city workhouse after stabbing a guard. He was found inebriated in a nearby bar several hours later. This attack and escape earned him an extra nine months in the Ramsey County Jail—he was released right before Christmas.
In April 1959, Elli robbed the Nickel Joint Tavern at 501 Blair Avenue in St. Paul. While the robbery was in progress, the phone rang. The bartender answered the phone and Elli shot him, wounding him on his left side. Elli got $700 in the robbery. Back in January of that year, he had robbed the same establishment for $500.
Elli was soon taken into custody and later convicted of armed robbery and aggravated assault. A Ramsey County judge sentenced him to 10-to-80 years in prison as a habitual offender. He was sent to the state’s largest penitentiary in Stillwater.
“Stillwater was a sort of different prison than I had been in before. It was a real maximum-security prison. Right away, I sense there wasn’t this comradeship among certain guys,” Elli told Terkel.
“I remember the first day I came to prison. It was noon and all these old lifers sat huddled in one section. To them it was a big deal every time a new guy came in, and they’d ask how long he was in for,” Elli wrote in a brief autobiography he completed for his publisher in 1966. He conversed with men in their 60s and 70s, one of whom had been incarcerated for 48 years.
“It was psychic shock. I suddenly realized society wasn’t kidding. They’ll bury you here,” he wrote.
Elli decided that he wanted to become a writer, as it was a hobby he could pursue in his cell. He started checking out books about writing, as well as books about philosophy and anthropology, from the prison library.
“I just filled my library card with the numbers of all these books and started reading them,” Elli told Terkel. “Never before had I done much reading in the other prisons. I was always on some other kick. Health kick, working out, boxing, things like that.”
Eventually, Elli joined up with a group of other writers in Stillwater called the Ink Weavers. They met weekly to read and critique one another’s stories. Once a month, writers from the Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop came to Stillwater to participate. Initially, Elli just listened, but he soon submitted his own work.
Several other published writers emerged from the Stillwater Prison writing group, including crime novelist E. Johnson and Harley Sorensen, who served for years as a reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune.
The Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop sponsored an annual O. Henry Short Story Contest for the Ink Weavers during the Christmas season. In 1961, Elli won the contest with a story called “Skid Row Santa” about a drunk who fell asleep at a bar on Christmas Eve. He wakes up and everyone has left the bar, so he rouses his friends from a nearby flophouse to indulge in the bar’s spirits. By the time police break up their party, the main character has fallen back asleep, only to be awoken hours later by the bartender who figures he had been sleeping there the whole time.
“The award was like the Pulitzer Prize to me. I wrote every night I was in prison after that,” Elli told Terkel.
In 1962, Elli signed up for a correspondence course at the University of Minnesota in narrative writing with Professor Harold J. Alford. The General Mills Foundation paid for Elli’s tuition as part of a program to help inmates take college courses.
“I didn’t have the prerequisites for the course, but I sent [Alford] one of my short stories and he accepted me,” Elli told Terkel.
“The Riot” began as a short story in the narrative writing course. Alford asked his students to write a 300-word essay on a personal experience, in which Elli described his experiences at Walla Walla. Later, he transformed his essay into a fictional short story, and Alford told him that the short story read like the synopsis of a novel. From there, Elli spent every night working on “The Riot” in his cell.
Alford worked with Elli on the book for three years, helping him create a manuscript that was ready to show to literary agents and publishers. Eventually, Alford helped him secure his release. The professor spoke persuasively on Elli’s behalf at his 1965 parole hearing.
Courtesy of University of Minnesota Libraries
Elli earned parole from Stillwater on Dec. 20, 1965, after six-and-a-half years of incarceration. He spent the next several weeks at Alford’s home in Minneapolis’ Kenwood neighborhood, including time while the professor and his family visited California.
“I kind of sweated it out too, because around Christmastime there were some burglaries in that area,” Elli told Terkel.
Alford contacted a literary agent friend named Ann Elmo. She pitched the book to Coward-McCann, who said yes within three days. The publisher went so far as to award Elli with its annual Thomas R. Coward Memorial Award for Best First Novel, which came with a book deal and a $10,000 prize.
Elli dedicated the book to Alford and donated his original manuscripts to the University of Minnesota Libraries. He said he spent much of his advance on dental work as well as gifts for his mother and new girlfriend.
“The Riot” was released on Jan. 3, 1967, and was an immediate hit. It reached several best-seller lists and was a featured selection by the Literary Guild for January 1967.
Elli appeared widely on television and radio to promote the book. His most prominent spots came on “The Today Show,” “The Mike Douglas Show,” “To Tell the Truth,” and Terkel’s nationally syndicated radio program.
Elli toured the Midwest after the book’s release. He did book signings at a number of department stores, including Dayton’s in downtown Minneapolis. For a time, his publisher hosted a dedicated hotline where readers could call and purchase signed copies of the book.
He sold the paperback rights to the book for $65,000 and the film rights to Paramount Pictures for $100,000. “The Riot” was translated into a half-dozen languages.
Paramount Pictures bet big on “The Riot,” which the studio renamed “Riot” while in production. The studio considered Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen for the part of Cully Briston, but ultimately went with football legend Jim Brown, whom they were trying to break out as a major star after his successful supporting roles in hit films like “Ice Station Zebra” (1968) and “The Dirty Dozen” (1967).
Future Academy Award winner Gene Hackman served in a supporting role as Red Farker, the inmate that instigated the prison takeover. At the time, Hackman was a rising star in Hollywood. He had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Buck Barrow in the era-defining film “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967). The film’s director Buzz Kulik was little known at the time but would go on to direct the made-for-tv tearjerker “Brian’s Song” (1971) about the friendship of football superstar Gale Sayers and his cancer-stricken teammate, Brian Piccolo.
“Riot” was shot primarily at the Arizona State Prison in Florence, located roughly halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, with a generous budget of nearly $2 million. The prison’s actual warden, Frank A. Eyman, played the warden in the film, and real-life inmates served as extras.
Despite the book’s success, the film version of Elli’s story failed to connect with the public or with critics. “Riot” opened to mixed reviews and a tepid box office in 1969.
The selection of Brown as Cully Briston irked Elli, who had not described the book’s main character as African American. Elli was further dismayed by the film’s conclusion, in which Brown successfully escapes from prison after freeing the hated guard. The film was also much more violent than the book, which Elli thought wasted some of the story’s dramatic tension.
Despite his newfound wealth, Elli’s parole required him to work a full-time day job. For a time, he worked as an administrator for the Ad Art Advertising Agency in downtown Minneapolis and lived in an efficiency apartment across the street. All the while, Elli tried to get a handle on another novel he had written, a hulking 200,000-word manuscript called “Give Us This Day Our Daily Grapes.” The novel tells the story of three men from Skid Row who inherit a home in a nice suburban neighborhood. They allow the home to fall into disrepair and come into conflict with their neighbors.
The book was never published. Elli said later that he had trouble focusing on writing without the built-in discipline of prison. His lifelong struggle with alcoholism also played a significant role in derailing his work as a writer. Later, he worked for the non-profit Metropolitan Council, mentoring parolees on public resources (typically education or job training) they could use to stay out of trouble.
By the mid-1970s, Frank Elli was broke. He said he drank through every dollar he ever earned. During the early-to-mid 1970s, he went to alcohol rehabilitation clinics on six different occasions.
“Treatment works if you’re deadly serious about quitting. I just went in to get healthy,” he said of his trips to rehab for a 1977 story in the Minnesota Star Tribune.
At the time of that reporting, Elli was working as a cook for a friend named Del Meath at the Chatland Café, a diner on University Avenue in St. Paul. Years earlier, the two had served time together in the Ramsey County Jail. Meath had turned his life around and started the Chatland Café, which was a nonprofit entity that supported Chatland House, a home for men recovering from substance abuse.
Elli never published another book, and he never conquered his alcoholism. In October 1982, Elli was diagnosed with throat cancer. He spent the rest of his life at the Roseville home of his friends Del and Wendy Meath. He died on Jan. 16, 1984, at age 58.
Despite the challenges Elli faced during his decade-and-a-half of freedom, the inmate-turned-writer’s story is one of triumph through diligence, even if that diligence lasted just a few years.
