On Monday, the Guardian tipped me off to Spacesicks’ I Can Read Movies series.
Since this project has been up since the January, I am feeling woefully unhip over the fact that I have just discovered the wide, wonderful, dizzying world of Spacekick. I actually don’t know QUITE how to describe this mind-bending experience so all I can say is you have to see it to believe it.
The concept: give cult classic and popular films the 1960s pop art book cover treatment.
The result: sweeeeeeeeetness.
Filed under: book review, literature | Tags: A Dog's Life, historical fiction, Sunnyside; Glen David Gold; Charlie Chaplin
The same brand of white-hot prose and ever-so-clever historical fudging that made Glen David Gold’s magical Carter Beats the Devil a critical and popular smash, is alive and well in Sunnyside. Gold’s second novel is a sprawling, intricately crafted telling of the birth of celebrity culture in 20th century America and its worldwide sociological ramifications, with Charlie Chaplin as his muse.
Although Chaplin is very much the central character, Sunnyside isn’t so much about him as it is about the fact of him and, by extension, the mass hysteria caused by the public’s need to project onto a popular figure their own personal needs and desires. (Something that obsesses our society to this very day.) He was the first figure to enter into the world’s collective consciousness through the intensely personal experience of film and, fittingly, Sunnyside opens with an event of mass hallucination: Chaplin being spotted in over 800 different places at the same time on the same day.
From that point on, the fates of three men intertwine and intermingle—although never fully crashing head-on. Hugo Black, a spoiled, brooding man of priggish intellect and a misplaced sense of superiority. The “unfairly handsome” Leland Wheeler, a pleasantly shallow aspiring actor who believes he is destined for fame for reasons he cannot quite explain. And of course, Chaplin, a man who defies definition.
Their hot pursuit of what eludes them most (fame for Leland, affirmation for Hugo and the meaning of it all for Chaplin) results in an exhaustive narrative that travels from the trenches in France to the Russian wilderness to the virgin orange groves of Hollywood and back again, enlisting an all-star supporting cast along the way including Doug Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Zukor, Edna Purviance, Frances Marion —and my favorite surprise of the book—Rin Tin Tin.
Gold’s solid realization of Chaplin makes him far and away the strongest component of the novel’s narrative braid—he is at once charming, infuriating, hilarious and miserable and demanding of our every attention. When he’s on, we are so there. 
Which, to be honest, cripples the book somewhat in that the weight and import of Wheeler and Black are questionable. One or two of Sunnyside’s strands could have used cutting (Hugo Black feels an afterthought for purposes of being an object lesson) and this voluminous novel is not with out its share of 7th-inning stretch drags, but were are in the end dazzled enough with Gold’s scope and skill, that we can forgive his persistent flirting with the superfluous. (Fans of Carter Beats the Devil forewarned: whereas Carter is engaging and accessible, Sunnyside is much more of a demanding investment.)
Gold’s mind-bending blend of imagination, history, reality, surrealism, drama, comedy, pathos, social comment and a dash of magic results in literary alchemy that is a probing page-turner nonetheless.
Filed under: arts, book review, classic movies, culture, film, history, hollywood, literature, movies | Tags: book review, screenwriting; hollywood screenplay; ben hecht; herman mankiewicz; f scott fitzgerald; king vidor; irving thalberg
What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting
By Marc Norman
Three Rivers Press
List price: $17.95
Brawling, boozing, brilliance and all manner of ballyhoo swirl around like a brandy in a snifter in this deliciously vivid, vibrant and endlessly fascinating work from Marc Norman.
F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda running amok at Hollywood parties, stealing purses and boiling them in Sam Goldwyn’s kitchen. Irving Thalberg’s story conference with Laurence Stallings and King Vidor at Mabel Normand’s funeral mass. Nathanael West coping with writers block by hunting birds in the Republic Studio trees. David Selznick fist fighting with Charlie MacArthur. Ben Hecht scrawling obscene lipstick love messages on a passed out Herman Mankiewicz’s stomach. It’s all in there in Norman’s beautifully written, tirelessly researched and knee-slappingly entertaining history of Hollywood screenwriting. The names Robert Riskin, Anita Loos, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Nunnally Johnson pop up regularly in Hollywood text—but this marks the first time the Hollywood screenwriter has a published history to call their own.
Detailing the turbulent and often downright angst-ridden history of the Hollywood scribe, What Happens Next manages to be both a serious scholarly achievement, and an irreverent page-turner. It deserves a special spot on every film fan’s bookshelf.
Filed under: arts, culture, journalism, literature | Tags: los angeles; book; book review; los angeles times; douglas fairbanks; Frank Lloyd Wright;
Who says that no one in LA reads? At least the fine folks at Jacket Copy do, the LA Times most excellent book blog. They recently posted a great review of Jeffery Vance’s Douglas Fairbanks biography , a delicious excerpt from T.C. Boyle’s The Women (Frank Lloyd Wright and the women who loved him) and are they ever abreast of the latest developments in all things literati—even including a sale at the Library of America.
Regardless of your particular abode of dwelling, Jacket Copy is a great way keep a reading list that is, not only current but also relevant.
Filed under: 1920s, arts, culture, history, hollywood, illustration, journalism, literature, nostalgia, vintage | Tags: movie stars; 1920s; magazines
I adore early 20th century magazine cartoons. They’re silly, yes, but ever so pointed and do they ever call a spade a gosh darn spade.
Looking through my collecion of old magazines I came across this Life magazine from 1924 (back then it was more of a fiction & poetry journal instead rather than the pictorial format that later made it famous) and I rather think it still makes a good point even today. I’m a hopeless cinephile, don’t get me wrong, and I made a complete asinine fool of myself when I spotted Gerard Butler at the supermarket not long ago, but the questions posed in this particular editorial cartoon still ring true (in my humble opinion). Just why should screen actors get, shall we say, musical accompaniment when the rest of us don’t? (say, oh i dunno, the middle school teacher’s $35,000 annum as opposed to the actor’s $1 mill+ per picture.)
Filed under: TV, arts, cinema, film, hollywood, literature, movies | Tags: graham greene; TCM; brighton rock; the third man;
My TV is rarely tuned to any other channel (save for CNN and BBC) and tonight is just another in the long ledger of reasons why life is simply better with TCM in one’s life. Tonight their lineup features the work of one of the 20th centuries most important writers, Graham Green. Author, screenwriter, playwright and critic, Greene’s work explored (or should I say, exposed) the depths of human morality and spirituality with the sort of remorseless chill and tightly wound plots that proved irresistible to both critics and the masses alike. George Orwell, in my opinion, put it best when he said that Green “appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.”
And so tonight, on what would have been Greene’s 104th birthday, TCM salutes Greene with his best screenplays (his magnificent The Third Man) as well as adaptations of his finest novels (Brighton Rock). Turn on the fireplace, make some coco or coffee or pour yourself a scotch and soda and enter Greene’s world, starting at 5PM eastern time with Brighton Rock (1947), followed by The Fallen Idol (1948), The Quiet American (1957), The End of the Affair (1955), The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1959).
Filed under: arts, culture, literature | Tags: jack kerouac; literature; books; writing; inspiration; beat movement;
Some inspirtational thoughts to jump start a new years resolution to sit down and write that novel/screenplay/poem/memoir/et all that you’ve been putting off your whole life.
From the eternal Jack Kerouac, his thirty essentials of writing prose:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside your own house
- Be in love with your life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
