From his original screenplay about a woman dealing with disappointments in her marriage and her life, it was the kind of low-key personal film more likely to come from Europe than an American director. The film earned an Oscar nomination for star Jean Simmons. (Her own marriage to Brooks ended in divorce in 1980.) In 1972 Brooks was hired by Columbia Pictures to direct First Blood, with Bette Davis to be cast as a psychiatrist and either Lee Marvin or Burt Lancaster to be cast as Sheriff Will Teasle. Brooks intended the film to be a commentary on the perceptions of veterans from both World War II and the Vietnam War. He also intended to make Teasle a more sympathetic character, who at the end of the film would have ordered his men to drop their guns to try to reason with John Rambo before Rambo was shot by unknown gunman. The film was cancelled because the Vietnam War had not ended, and the rights were sold to Warner Bros. Pictures. Bite the Bullet (1975) was Brooks' return to the western. He based his original screenplay on the endurance horse races popular at the turn of the century. In 1977, he released another controversial film, an adaptation of Judith Rossner's 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Goodbar starred Diane Keaton as a Catholic school teacher who searches for sexual satisfaction in singles bars. Brooks made the film on a tight budget, and its frank treatment of sex and its horrific storyline brought praise and condemnation and sold tickets. He ended his career with Wrong Is Right (1982), a satire about the news media and world unrest starring Sean Connery, and a gambling addiction film with Ryan O'Neal and Catherine Hicks in Fever Pitch (1985). Fever Pitch featured a story about a renowned Los Angeles sportswriter who becomes a sports gambling addict. Brooks himself had been a sportswriter when a young man. Both movies were critical and commercial failures. Brooks tried developing other projects in the last years of his life. He suffered from heart ailments and a stroke before dying at his home in 1992 at the age of 79. Personal life In 1960, he married Jean Simmons, after her divorce from Stewart Granger. Brooks helped to raise Tracy, Simmons' daughter by Granger. The couple had another daughter, Kate, together in 1961. They separated in 1977 and were legally divorced