Classic books becoming movies

Rarely is the journey from classic novel to decent film as successful as it was with To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, or even something destined to become a classic, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. But since it seems as if today's movie makers are pretty much out of original ideas, perhaps they are wise to continue mining classic literature for good plots.

Although I preferred Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), I was interested to read that after numerous unsuccessful attempts to bring it to the big screen and/or TV dating back to the 1970s, Atlas Shrugged (1950) is being made into a film.



The 1949 film version of The Fountainhead is generally considered today to be a classic. This current effort to do Atlas Shrugged is an indie production with what is to me an unknown cast, so maybe this film treatment of a classic novel will avoid ending up becoming a train wreck such as the 1990 film (an awesome book I'd read and movie I looked forward to seeing):


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Their were neither castles nor winged unicorns in the novel
Reading about cameras rolling on the Atlas Shrugged movie, I am reminded there has never been a decent (in my humble onion) film adaption of either The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Call of the Wild, two of my favorites. Too often, it seems film versions of books I've enjoyed get made by people who seem to have read a completely different book than I had. Case in point is the terrible made for TV Disney stab at A Wrinkle in Time (2003). I've read that the producers intended for it to be a mini-series and had to cut it down to single movie size. What that tells me is they invented even more cr*p that wasn't actually in the novel than ended up being in the unfortunate finished product:



Movie poster for the odd Robert Altman film version of what is among my very favorite books.

Sometimes it seems as if the movie maker attempting to make a movie out of a classic novel is overwhelmed by the task or simply too intimidated by the source material to make a good celluloid adaption, as in the cases of Catch-22 (1970) or 1984 (1984). I actually really liked Catch-22 and think it would have been bigger had it not come out two months after a film with a similar style and point-of-view, M*A*S*H.



So, it remains to be seen how this version of Atlas Shrugged will turn out. In the meantime, where are the movie versions of The Catcher in the Rye or A Confederacy of Dunces??

Preppy Handbook redux in 3-D?

Via Gawker comes this news that the editor and co-author of The Official Preppy Handbook is set to release a sequel, called True Prep: It's a Whole New Old World, in September 2010. The original came out in 1980 and sold around 1.3 million copies. One of those copies belonged to me, and I treated it as if it were The Bible. Suffice it to say, I took that sh*t fairly seriously.

For the uninitiated or unfamiliar, here's the Wikipedia entry:

The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) is a tongue-in-cheek humor reference guide co-written and edited by Lisa Birnbach. It describes an aspect of North American culture she styles as prepdom. In addition to insights on prep school and university life at socially acceptable schools, it illuminates many aspects of upper-class, old money WASP society. Topics range from appropriate clothing for various social events to how to choose the correct college and major. While the book addresses "preppy" life from birth to old age, its coverage is in the greatest depth for the school, college, and young-adult years; coverage becomes thinner for subsequent stages of life.

It may have been considered "tongue-in-cheek," but I knew people like the ones parodied on the pages of The Official Preppy Handbook. I had a good friend who was from Massachusetts (Boston), my best friend ended up being sent to Phillips Exeter Academy (like Holden and J.D. Salinger), and two buddies went to Harvard (others to Rice, Cornell, and U.V.A.). I ended up at U.T., pledging the Animal House frat my first semseter (Fall '85). I knew guys who wore clothes like this:



Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
EBiN on floor in the center, yellow tie, probably a little bit drunk, mid-'80s
How interesting it is a sequel to The Official Preppy Handbook is set to be released the exact same year of J.D. Salinger's death - I have both of them sort of intertwined in my mind. Holden Caufield was the ideal "prep," a fact I seem to remember him being mentioned on at least one of the pages in Handbook. And I might not have been so keen to read The Catcher in the Rye at all had it not been mentioned so frequently (as far as my memory recalls) on the pages of The Official Preppy Handbook. So I can at least say that about it. I read the book for the first time that 8th grade school year, at a very impressionable time. In fact, the Handbook and the movie Animal House were the basis for my world view for a long, long, long, long time. Longer than I care to admit, publicly. Long. Not now though. Not too much. Well, maybe a little bit.

Coppola directs Twilight movie?

It'll never happen, but the people behind the Twilight movie franchise want Sofia Coppola to direct the third movie in the trilogy, Breaking Dawn.

The bigscreen adaption of Stephenie Meyer's final book in the Twilight "saga" (ha) is said to end up as two separate films. I've never seen, nor have I ever read a Twilight film or book. But I might be interested in seeing one done if it was done by Coppola. She directed one of my favorites, Lost in Translation, and I really liked parts of Marie Antoinette. That movie was sort of like a remake of Barry Lyndon.

The creators of the Twilight saga have also offered Breaking Dawn to Gus Van Sant and Bill Condon. I'd say Condon is the most likely of the three to accept. Wouldn't a Van Sant film be interesting?!

Son of Salinger

Wow! Mind exploding here. I'm currently reading (for the very first time) Franny and Zooey (1961), J.D. Salinger's third book, in which he combined two short stories ("Franny" from 1955 and "Zooey," 1957). It is somewhat dedicated to Salinger's son, Matthew, who was a one-year-old at the time of its publication. Despite assuming the son of perhaps the most elusive and hermit-like "celebrity" of our time would possibly be more private, anonymous even, I did an image search for him out of curiosity. But not only is he not camera shy, he is of all things an actor. His first role was as one of the Alpha Betas in Revenge of the Nerds (1984). He is #84 in this scene:


Salinger must have been so proud...
The son of the author of The Catcher in the Rye
Oh, the irony! What a trip, huh? Matthew Salinger was also Captain America in an internationally released film (from 1990):


Maybe this was a well known fact and common knowledge, but it's news to me! It's almost as bizarre a case of worlds colliding as Geraldo Rivera having been married to the daughter of Kurt Vonnegut...

"Comin Thro' the Rye"

Holden Caulfield

This is great. I'm rerererereading (that's at least four times) The Catcher in the Rye. Anyway, that's a nice interpretation of Holden, complete with red hunting cap and the copy of "Little Shirley Beans" he bought for Phoebe. It was done by artist Carmela Alvarado. Check out more like it here. And this is an older, Geocities site, but it has a pretty cool photo tour of NYC as Holden knew it.

"Bright Lights, Big City"

Jimmy Reed

Travels with Charley

Seattle, 1961 (photograph by Hans Namuth)
I'm trying to get reinspired to do some sort of photographically oriented road trip by among other things, rereading a favorite of mine, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Basically, Steinbeck set out in the fall of 1960 to "rediscover America." He had spent the better portion of the previous decade living and travelling in England and France, and he felt he'd lost touch with the Joads, the "Docs," the Trasks, the George Miltons of America. Presumably, he felt this would hinder his ability to write authentically about them.

Rocinante, National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California
So he loaded up supplies, as well as the book's namesake, an "old gentlemen French poodle known as Charley" (p. 7), into a customized, modified camper truck he christened Rocinante.

As far as doing any traveling of my own (mainly day tripping), I'm currently stuck in this mode, for the most part:

In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen. As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable...to give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy. I didn't want to go. (p. 17)

Now, if I could drive through America circa 1960 armed with a 21st century digital camera (or really any camera for that matter), I wouldn't be sitting here typing this right now! The chance to photograph neon signs alone boggles the mind, not to mention the motor courts and gas stations. But alas, that America has vanished.

Okay, I'm not a drinker, at all (the most alcohol consumption I was ever involved with was done, ironically, before I was of the legal drinking age), but I'm tickled by this passage:

Because I was self-contained, I thought it might be nice if I could invite people I met along the way to my home for a drink, but I had neglected to lay in liquor. But there are pretty little bottle stores on the back roads of this state. I knew there were some dry states but had forgotten which they were, and it was just as well to stock up...You never know what people will want to drink. I ordered bourbon, scotch, gin, vermouth, vodka, a medium good brandy, aged applejack, and a case of beer. It seemed to me that those might take care of most situations. It was a big order for a little store. The owner was impressed.

"Must be quite a party."
"No--it's just traveling supplies." (p. 21)

Now, let's visualize that, shall we:

A river of a novel

The illustrations are by Edward Windsor Kemble, and were included in the original, 1884 publication of the novel.

The French call an episodic, wandering novel a "roman fleuve" - the novel as a river. Such is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I've just reread it and have a couple of thoughts. First, being a little bit older and more experienced now than when I last read the book, I felt really sorry for Huck, not yet fourteen-years-old during the year of the novel's events, 1839. Despite being raised in hellish conditions by an abusive, alcoholic father in dirt-floor squalor and famine-level poverty, he is unfailingly clever (smart even) and surprisingly sensitive and sweet. Jim is treated so poorly throughout (and depicted so stereotypically, I assume), he almost doesn't register as a human being. Is he simply a stereotype, or were enslaved Africans really like that?


Secondly, Ernest Hemingway was absolutely right about the final chapters:

If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.

Hemingway is also quoted as saying the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim loses his freedom. That is a very accurate description. I found Tom Sawyer and his elaborate schemes tiresome, so I read through those parts very quickly. I kind of like the way this person succinctly puts it:

Read for my Mark Twain class, started on 2/2 and finished on 2/7. I loved the first 31 chapters of this book. LOVED. Huck is just the greatest character, and Jim is awesome, and yes. Unfortunately, in chapter 32, Tom Sawyer saunters in and has to mess it up for everyone. What a little assh*le. Go away, Tom. No one likes you.

Yet the passages where Huck and Jim are out on the raft, floating down the Mississippi River ("the monstrous big river"), are prose as poetry, beautiful and stunning. Their drifting journey down the Mississippi "may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature" (source).

From chapter 19 ("The Duke and the Dauphin Come Aboard"):

"Two or three nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely...Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time...It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened..."

Obscure cartoon I barely remember

In 1968, Hannah-Barbera took Mark Twain's characters and thrust them into various make-believe fantasy worlds. In this live-action/animated series, the actors were superimposed over animated backgrounds. It's an obscure cartoon I barely remember.


The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
This is the very reason J.D. Salinger sued to block the publication of a so-called "new" take on his Catcher in the Rye.

"Three O'Clock in the Morning"

The Great Gatsby original cover art by Francis Cugat
“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.

Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where "Three O'Clock in the Morning," a neat, sad little waltz of the year, was drifting out of the open door. After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marveled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of devotion. (p. 115)


F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chasing ghosts, fictional and otherwise

Rereading To Kill a Mockingbird and have just completed the Monroe County Heritage Museum's book, Monroeville: The Search for Harper Lee's Maycomb. Some things still remain in the town in which Nelle Harper Lee grew up.

This screencap is from the very last scene in the film, and back on the fireplace mantle is a portrait of Atticus Finch's wife, Jem and Jean Louise's (Scout's) mother, who, according to the novel, died of a heart attack when Scout was two-years-old. We all know Harper Lee's father was an attorney, who was morally and ethically similar to Atticus. But did you know Lee's mother also died before her father? Harper Lee's mother (and here is the first bit of "interesting information") was named Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Of course the novel has a character who is poor farmer named Walter Cunningham, but even neater is the fact the author's mother's maiden name was Finch. A sweet tribute, I'd say.

For years, at least before Al Gore finally invented the Web, fans primarily knew the reclusive author's appearance to be as it was depicted in this photograph included with the novel's first edition (1960), taken by Truman Capote (picture from)...

...or maybe as she has appeared currently, like in this picture of her receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007:
Bush's greatest presidential act?
So it's a real treat to see a photo of the then chain smoker Harper Lee as a student at the University of Alabama, where she was the editor of the yearbook, Rammer Jammer, during the 1946-47 academic year. This is sometimes what it's like putting blog posts together:

Although perhaps easily mistaken for the prop featured in this touching scene from the film...

..."When Greogory Peck accepted the Oscar for his role in the movie, he had in his hand A.C. Lee's watch, which Harper Lee had given him when her father died." (Monroe County Heritage Museums, p. 15)

"...Gregory Peck was walking through the airport and he ran into somebody. When he stopped to look at his watch, it was gone. He said he just could hardly stand the fact that he had lost Atticus' watch." (p. 15)


Amasa Coleman Lee
"They say that after the book came out and was so popular, people would ask Mr. Lee to sign the book, and he always signed it 'Atticus.'" (p. 15)

The house of the "mysterious neighbor" (Boo Radley)? It's on this map of Monroeville/Maycomb. For a fan of the novel, that's some fascinating stuff!

Finally, the Monroe County Courthouse (c. 1903) would have probably been torn down to make way for a more modern building (as so many courthouses are) had it not been for the novel and film. It has been home to the Monroe County Heritage Museum since 1991.

picture source
The courtroom was used as a model for the film's version and is virtually identical.

"The Devil's Gallop"

I received Philip Norman's John Lennon: The Life as a Christmas gift, and despite having read a couple of other Lennon biographies (as well as numerous books on the Beatles, including Norman's own Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation), I am enjoying it thus far. And I'm learning new things about a topic I thought I'd already exhausted. Chapter three includes the following passage:

From John's earliest childhood, his response to music was instant and visceral. In 1946, just before his sixth birthday, the BBC Light Programme started the nightly fifteen-minute adventures of Dick Barton, Special Agent, and Austerity forerunner to James Bond, introduced by a melodramatic theme tune called "The Devil's Gallop." Mimi recalled how deathly white John's face always went each evening at 6:45 as its frantic strains echoed through the house. (Norman, p. 42)

John posing outside 251 Menlove Avenue (Mendips)
So, here is an early musical imprint (as played by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain) on John Winston Lennon (and therefore, the world):


John and Mimi

Happy B-Day, J.D. Salinger!

From Wikipedia:

Jerome David "J.D." Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. He has not published an original work since 1965 and has not been interviewed since 1980.

Raised in Manhattan, New York, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948 he published the critically-acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read, selling around 250,000 copies a year.

The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny; Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently.


"Comin thro' the Rye," by Robert Burns

Philip Roth on cell phones

In Exit Ghost (2007), writer Philip Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, returns like Rip Van Winkle to a post-9/11 New York after being away for eleven years :

What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing--the cell phones...I remembered New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say--so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had prevously held them up and collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? (pp. 63, 64)

"Dream"

I'm just now rereading Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize (two of 'em) winning novel, American Pastoral, for the second time. It's so, very good. The first third of the novel, entitled "Paradise Remembered," features Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, attending his forty-fifth high school reunion. As the reunion party winds down, Zuckerman dances the final slow dance with an at first unrecognizable women, who "remembers" herself to Zuckerman by telling him: "I had a pink angora sweater...You took me on a class hayride."

From page 84:

"Well, all this," I told her, as we stood there just swaying together to the one-man band closing the day down singing, "Dream...when you're feelin' blue,...dream...that's the thing to do"--"all this I did not know," I told her, "on the harvest moon hayride in October 1948."

Further down on p. 84:

...and first we were laughing and then, unexpectedly, Joy began to cry and, perhaps because of that damn song, "Dream," which we used to dance to with the lights turned down in somebody or other's basement back when the Pied Pipers still had Jo Stafford and used to sing it the way it's supposed to be sung--in locked harmony, to that catatonic forties beat (I love that - both the writing and the catatonic beat), with the ethereal tinkle of the xylophone hollowly sounding behind them--

....and thus was this post born.



From the Wikipedia entry

"Dream" – sometimes referred to as "Dream (When You're Feeling Blue)" – is a jazz and pop standard with words and music by Johnny Mercer in 1944 and performed by many artists. The most popular versions of the songs include those by The Pied Pipers, Frank Sinatra, and Roy Orbison.

For Capitol Records, The Pied Pipers, with lead singer June Hutton, made a version of "Dream" which became a major hit in 1945. The Pied Pipers would revive this ballad in the 1955 Fred Astaire-Leslie Caron musical film, Daddy Long Legs (the makers of the movie couldn't have possibly believed the "Slue-Foot" would become "nation's sensation"...).