Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      David J. Skal, Scholar Who Took Horror Seriously, Dies at 71

      by

      In books like “The Monster Show” and “Screams of Reason,” he examined the cultural significance of movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people.David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not always taken seriously — movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people — whose erudition, combined with a chatty writing style, made his books lively and entertaining.As an evangelist for horror, he was a regular guest on NPR, explicating frightful topics in a sonorous and friendly voice, and a consultant to Universal Studios for a theme park ride in Florida, “Halloween Horror Nights.” He also added commentary tracks to Universal’s DVD series of classic monster movies, from “Dracula” (1931) to “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954).“One of the major functions that monsters provide for us is they let us process our fears about the real world without having to look at them too directly,” he told The New York Times in 2014.He could riff in his writings on the cultural theories of Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling and R.D. Laing. But his own critiques were never stuffy, grounded as they were in his personal fandom for a genre he first encountered as a boy living outside Cleveland. His first movie memory was watching “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” on television.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Barbie’ Is Adapted? Let’s Fix the Oscar Screenplay Categories.

      by

      In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Emmys In Memoriam Segment Pays Tribute to Matthew Perry and Norman Lear

      by

      The Emmys paid tribute to the actors, writers and producers who died since the last awards, taking an extra beat to honor Norman Lear, the famed TV writer and producer who died last month at 101.The in memoriam segment recognized two television actors who died unexpectedly: Andre Braugher, who was known for his roles on “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”; and Matthew Perry, the “Friends” star. (The musical accompaniment, from the duo the War and Treaty and Charlie Puth, included the “Friends” theme song.)Here are other members of the television industry who the program recognized:Angela Lansbury, the famed actress who starred in “Murder, She Wrote.”Angus Cloud, who portrayed a lovable drug dealer on the HBO show “Euphoria.”Barbara Walters, the pioneering TV news reporter.Bob Barker, the longtime host of “The Price Is Right.”David Jacobs, who created the soap opera “Dallas.”Harry Belafonte, the barrier-breaking performer in music, movies and TV.Leslie Jordan, the comic actor who was a cast member on “Will & Grace.”Mark Margolis, who played a fearsome former drug lord in “Breaking Bad.”Paul Reubens, the comic actor behind Pee-wee Herman.Richard Roundtree, the prolific actor who had recurring roles in “Heroes,” “Being Mary Jane” and “Family Reunion.”Ron Cephas Jones, who won two Emmys for his role on “This Is Us.”Stephen Boss, the dancer and reality star known as tWitch.Suzanne Somers, who gained fame on the hit sitcom “Three’s Company” before building a health and diet business empire. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Norma Barzman, Blacklisted Screenwriter, Dies at 103

      by

      After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in self-exile overseas.Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died on Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death.Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups.The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman told The Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we were a little silly, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there was a chance of making a better world.”Mrs. Barzman with her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, in Madrid in 1961. When the opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London in 1949, they expected to be there for six weeks. They ended up living abroad until 1976.via Barzman familyFor a time in the 1930s and ’40s, being a Communist, or just sympathetic to the cause, was considered de rigueur among the Hollywood left. But with the onset of the Cold War, attitudes began to shift. Rumors of a government crackdown percolated.The couple were sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman in a convertible stopped to talk. After a guarded introduction — her name was Norma, too — she told them that there was a police car at the bottom of the hill, stopping anyone turning onto the street to ask them about the Barzmans. Years later, they would realize that the other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.That fall, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a group of screenwriters, directors and producers to testify about their connections to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer questions, and each was later found in contempt. Though the Barzmans were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten, they feared they would be subpoenaed soon.A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives released the so-called Waldorf Statement, which declared that the 10 witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their relationship to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the industry.Work for the Barzmans quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, an opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London, where the blacklist didn’t reach. They set sail on the Queen Mary, expecting a six-week trip.They would not return to the United States until 1965, and they would live abroad until 1976.After several years in London, they moved to Paris; they eventually settled in Provence. They became local celebrities of a sort — the family that defied the blacklist — and made friends with the likes of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.An undated photo from the Cannes Film Festival. From left, Mr. Barzman, Mrs. Barzman and the Italian filmmaker Basilio Franchina.via Barzman familyMr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European productions, though often without credit. Mrs. Barzman got some work, too, but it was harder, especially since she also was raising seven children.Another friend, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek one day and called me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she said in an interview for the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film industry and the community around it had changed significantly, and they never managed to restart their careers.“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically, she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became known for his work in computational linguistics.They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland at the start of World War II.The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the progressive people I liked and who were politically active were Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”Norma Barzman with her father, Samuel Levor, in Nice, France, in about 1930.via Barzman familyShe met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, yet another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern movies were too complex for women to write. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.Mrs. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946: “Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman is survived by another daughter, Luli Barzman; five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).She also became outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the role many in the industry played in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who has written extensively about the blacklist, called her the era’s “keeper of the flame.”In 1999 she joined some 500 other people outside the Academy Awards ceremony, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan.To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified before the House committee, identifying several friends and colleagues in the industry as former Communists and earning long-lasting enmity from many in Hollywood.Mrs. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, carried a sign that read “Kazan Is a Fink.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Herman Raucher, Screenwriter Best Known for ‘Summer of ’42,’ Dies at 95

      by

      His screenplay, based on his own youthful experience, was nominated for an Oscar. His other films included “Sweet November,” based on his own unproduced play.Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, which included a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, Conn. He was 95.His daughter Jenny Raucher confirmed the death, in a hospital.Mr. Raucher spent the 1950s and ’60s writing scripts for anthology television series and advertising copy for the Walt Disney Company and various agencies.But recollections of his own summer of ’42 lingered. So did the memory of one of his close friends, Oscar Seltzer, a medic who was killed on Mr. Raucher’s 24th birthday, in 1952, while caring for a wounded soldier during the Korean War.“Summer of ’42” tells the story of three 15-year-old friends — Hermie, Oscy and Benjie — and their early exploration of girls and, tentatively, sex, during a summer vacation on a Nantucket-like island early in World War II.Hermie (played by Gary Grimes) becomes infatuated with Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill), a woman in her early 20s. In one scene, he visibly trembles on a ladder as she hands him boxes for him to place in her dusty attic. Their tender lovemaking occurs after she receives a telegram telling her that her husband was killed in the war.The scene parallels Mr. Rauch’s real-life experience at age 14 with a woman on Nantucket, Mass.“I was in love with her before the incident ever happened,” Mr. Raucher told The Stuart News of Florida in 2002.In “Summer of ’42,” Hermie, a teenage character based on Mr. Raucher and played by Gary Grimes, falls in love with an older woman, played by Jennifer O’Neill.Warner Bros.“Summer of ’42” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $32 million (or about $245 million in today’s dollars) at the box office.Herman Raucher was born on April 13, 1928, in Brooklyn. His Austrian-born father, Benjamin, was a traveling salesman who had been a soldier, a boxer, a bouncer and, Mr. Raucher said in an interview, possibly a gun runner in Cuba. His mother, Sophie (Weinshank) Raucher, was a homemaker.Mr. Raucher graduated in 1949 from New York University, where he majored in marketing and created cartoons for a campus newspaper and magazine. He was soon hired by 20th Century Fox as a $38-a-week office boy. He was drafted into the Army in 1950 and served two years stateside during the Korean War.After being discharged, he got a call from Disney — he did not know how the company discovered him — and he worked in the company’s advertising department. He also wrote for ad agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, and was hired by Gardner Advertising as a vice president in 1964.He had begun writing for television and the stage in these years, including scripts for the anthology shows “Studio One,” “The Alcoa Hour” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” as well as a play, “Harold,” starring Anthony Perkins and Don Adams, that opened on Broadway in 1962 but closed after 20 performances.Mr. Raucher adapted his unproduced play, “Sweet November,” into a romantic melodrama starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis in 1968. He then collaborated with Mr. Newley on the script for “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” (1968), which was a notorious failure. Mr. Newley, who was also the star and director, plays a singing star simultaneously making and showing a movie about his self-indulgent life.Mr. Raucher’s next film, “Watermelon Man” (1970), starred the comedian Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance salesman who overnight turns Black. Critics were not kind; writing in The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said the “script is so uninspired and the direction so inept that ‘Watermelon Man’ runs out of gas long before the end is in sight.”Mr. Raucher told the film website Cinedump in 2016 that the director Melvin Van Peebles turned “Watermelon Man” into “more of a Black power film than I’d wanted.”Then came “Summer of ’42,” his biggest cinematic success. He had written the screenplay in 1958, but movie companies had rejected it, by his count, 49 times by the time Warner Bros. acquired it in 1970 and put it in the hands of Robert Mulligan, who had been nominated for an Oscar for directing “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).“Bob fell in love with the screenplay,” Mr. Raucher told Cinedump. “They asked how big a budget it was, he said a million dollars,” he added, referring to Warner Bros. executives. “They said go make it; they never read the script, they left us alone.”The studio did, however, ask that Hermie be 15, not 14 as Mr. Raucher had been.After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay. It was published before the film was released.During the filming, on the coast of Mendocino in Northern California, Mr. Mulligan told The San Francisco Examiner, “The story deals rather simply with the process of growing up, not unlike Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ which has some of the same comic spirit.”In the film, Dorothy leaves the island after her romantic interlude with Hermie and writes him a farewell note. The same thing happened to Mr. Raucher.Sometime after the film’s release, Mr. Raucher said, he received a letter, with no return address, from a woman in Ohio who he believed was the widow.“She wrote that the ghosts of that time were better left alone,” he told The New York Times in 2001 when a stage musical version of “Summer of ’42” was being performed in Connecticut.Mr. Raucher wrote several more screenplays, including “Class of ’44” (1973), a sequel to “Summer of ’42”; “Ode to Billie Joe” (1976), which was inspired by Bobbie Gentry’s song of the same name and directed by Max Baer Jr.; and “The Other Side of Midnight” (1977), based on Sidney Sheldon’s novel about love and vengeance set in Washington, Paris, Athens and Hollywood.He also wrote the novels “A Glimpse of Tiger” (1971), about two con artists; “There Should Have Been Castles” (1978), about a playwright and a dancer in the 1950s; and “Maynard’s House” (1980), about a troubled Vietnam veteran who is bequeathed a house in Maine by a slain comrade.Besides his daughter Jenny, Mr. Raucher is survived by another daughter, Jacqueline Raucher-Salkin, and two granddaughters. His wife, Mary Kathryn Martinet-Raucher, a dancer, died in 2002.After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, it was in postproduction for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay.“As fate would have it, the book comes out and becomes a best seller,” he told Cinedump. “So when the movie is finally released, the ad line is ‘Based on the national best seller.’ Which is absurd, because the book was written after the movie!” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Julia Jordan Set Aside Playwriting to Win Gender Parity in Theater

      by

      After years of fighting to win parity and recognition for women in theater, Julia Jordan said: “Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.”Ask the playwright Julia Jordan what the need was for the Lilly Awards, which she co-founded in 2010 to honor women in theater, and the answer is a mix of anecdote and statistic.Her mind goes straight to the years after she completed the playwriting program at the Juilliard School in 1996. As two men in her class, David Auburn and Stephen Belber, became some of the hottest young playwrights around, she struggled to get her work staged.“Very good friends of mine, no slam against them,” Jordan, 56, said on a December afternoon before she stepped down as executive director of the Lillys. “It was just odd.”The numbers bore out her perception. A report, published in 2002 by the New York State Council on the Arts Theater Program, found that only 17 percent of productions on U.S. stages in the 2001-02 season had been written by women.One day around 2003, she recalled, Auburn came over “because I was really depressed about it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you try switching the gender of your protagonists?’” (Auburn, reached by email, confirmed he was a good friend of Jordan, but said he does not remember this incident.) Writing male-focused narratives was, in any case, a conventional strategy for female playwrights at the time.“I literally took my most autobiographical play, and I made me male. And I called it ‘Boy,’” Jordan said. “Almost immediately people wanted to produce it.”To Jordan, a longtime leader in the fight for gender parity in theatrical production, all of this was context for the creation of the Lillys, which she started with the playwrights Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. The catalyst, though, was their collective outrage, in the spring of 2010, that one of the season’s best-reviewed Off Broadway hits, Melissa James Gibson’s “This,” was ignored by the existing award-giving bodies.The new accolade was for “everybody who should be getting awards, and who should have been getting awards and didn’t,” said Jordan, who, with Juliana Nash, wrote the acclaimed musical “Murder Ballad.”At the 2023 Lilly Awards, held in late November on the “Stereophonic” set at Playwrights Horizons, the hair and wig designer Cookie Jordan and the actors Liza Colón-Zayas and Ruthie Ann Miles were among the honorees. The playwright Kirsten Greenidge and the composer Georgia Stitt each received $25,000 prizes, funded by the Broadway producer Stacey Mindich, meant to buy them time to write.Under Jordan, the Lillys organization — named for Lillian Hellman — blossomed to include the Count, which tracks theatrical production statistics by gender and race; an artist residency program with child care; the online publication 3Views on Theater; and the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, which awards graduate school fellowships for female and nonbinary dramatic writers of color.Creating the Hansberry Initiative was one goal that Jordan felt she had to achieve before she could move on. The other was reaching gender parity for playwrights, which the Count’s preliminary figures indicate has happened this season on Off Broadway stages dedicated to new-play production.“We didn’t get 50/50 in 2020, but we have it now,” Jordan said.So on Dec. 31 she handed off her job to Sarah Rose Leonard and Brittani Samuel, the founders and editors of 3Views — though Jordan plans to share her connections and expertise as needed. (Samuel also contributes theater reviews to The New York Times.)Jordan is already at work on a few projects, including a family drama and a musical with the British singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLast month, with her tenure nearly finished, Jordan sat down to talk at a cafe in Flatbush, Brooklyn. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.At the awards in November, you said the Lillys are the thing in your career that you’re proudest of.I do feel like I had a little bit of a playwriting career happening, and then this was so time-consuming. But I got so much love for it, you know? I respond well to love [laughs], so it really started to kind of push my writing aside. That was always a little bit of a sadness, if I thought about it. At the same time, I feel like it’s kind of split my brain. I actually have to work at it to stay organized, you know? So between that and being a mom with young kids, that’s like three different brains, and I can only do two. I stopped teaching, which I loved, but that would have been four.So your work became being a champion?Yeah. Mostly I’m really proud of it. I meet young female writers, and they almost don’t know what happened, or they don’t know that it was so recent. Nobody has ever told them to write a play with a male lead. They’ve never been told that women’s plays are not very dramatic and are really poetic. They have never been told that the audience doesn’t really want to see plays by women. It’s just not on their radar. And that [progress] happened really quickly.How has doing this job changed you?Before this happened, I didn’t really ever think of myself as activist-y. I’m sort of surprised I was good at it.What are you going to do now?I have one project that I can’t talk about yet, kind of in my political, troublemaking world. But then I’m starting to write. I have a play that I’m working on, and I’m writing a musical with a pop star; she’s huge in Europe and England. Her name is Emeli Sandé. I get to go to London every few months and hang out in her studio. And then the play is a family drama.Do you think your activism will filter into your playwriting?I often wonder about that, because I don’t feel like I’m a super political writer. I always did write about girls, you know; I always did write about gender, in some sense. I really do like when people can write a political play really well. But I don’t know that if I went straight at it, I would be able to do a good job.As a playwright, do you feel like you’re going back into a theater that is changed from when you started the Lillys?A hundred percent. Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.The deck was really stacked when you started.It was stupid. And we had to sit through a lot of bad theater because of it. But yeah, I feel like it’s wildly different. I also feel like theater goes through these phases of what it’s interested in. What I write about, I don’t know anymore how that fits in.Your final Lilly Awards honored women over 40?Over 50. There were a couple [in their 40s]. Close enough.Why that focus?The women that were my level and a little bit older who got passed by when they weren’t producing women, nobody went back and read the Susan Smith Blackburn [Prize] lists [of plays by women] and went, “Hey, we should probably look at these again.” It’s a whole ecosystem problem because for the most part, literary managers and their assistants tend to be young — tend to be female, but tend to be young. So they’re not going back. The women over 50, they were the ones who really kind of made all this happen. And they didn’t benefit from it in the same way [as younger women]. They really didn’t. That’s why we wanted to start shining a light in that direction and just say, “Hey, not dead yet.”But I also think that those plays by those women would really speak to a piece of the audience that needs to be kept around during this sort of building the new audience. Instead of like, “Let’s just not have anybody go to the theater for a while while we build a new audience,” how about we do both? More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      David Mamet Names the Books That Explain the Real Hollywood

      by

      What’s the last great book you read?“A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,” by Frederick Law Olmsted. Also note: “The Life of George Brummell, Esq., Commonly Called Beau Brummell,” by Captain Jesse, and “A Diary in America,” by Frederick Marryat. Enjoy.Can a great book be badly written?If it were badly written how could it be a great book? Perhaps if it contained Great Ideas? According to whom? The writer? Who died and left him boss? In the estimation of the reader? If I am he, nope, for why should I credit any ideas of a lox who didn’t realize he couldn’t write? Reading great prose is one of my chiefest joys. When I find myself rewriting the book I’m reading, I not only throw it away, I do not recycle it. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?“The Wallet of Kai Lung,” by Ernest Bramah.Which novels or novelists do you admire for their dialogue?George V. Higgins.Which books best capture Hollywood and the challenge of making movies?The best book about Hollywood is my “Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.”Here please find its like:“A Girl Like I,” by Anita Loos. She was the first of the great Hollywood screenwriters, and in it from the days of the silents. Her “Lorelei” stories became “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” See also “The Honeycomb,” an autobiography of Adela Rogers St. Johns. She started in journalism before writing for silents, and wrote many of the great “women’s” pictures of early sound.Jim Tully was a “road kid,” riding the rails, and washed up in Hollywood, where he worked, in various capacities, for Chaplin, of whom he wrote a short unauthorized biography. Also please read his “Jarnegan,” a roman à clef about a thug and criminal who comes to Hollywood, and becomes a great director.Another must read is Ivor Montagu’s “With Eisenstein in Hollywood.” He and Sergei wandered in, in the 1930s. They were flogging a screenplay for “An American Tragedy” and a gold rush drama, “Sutter’s Gold.” They had a few drinks, and had their lunch handed to them, and went home.Bob Evans, once head of Paramount, wrote “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” which is a laugh a minute, but one must read between the lies (sic). Scotty Bowers, a fixer, wrote “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars” with Lionel Friedberg. Are his accounts true? He only “outed” the dead, which indicates his intelligence, but gives no clues to his veracity. Hollywood has always been about sex, until just recently. Now it is about Attack-Decency; and, as with anything, those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know. A note to those who might buy my book. In it I recount a talk I had with my old friend Noma Copley. She worked for Disney in the late 1940s, and told me, at their first meeting, he invited her into his inner sanctum, which was covered with murals depicting his characters in an orgy, and said, “Call me Walt.”What book would you most like to see turned into a movie that hasn’t already been adapted?The only book not adapted to the screen is the phone book. I tried, but only got as far as the title: “Funny Names, No Plot.”What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?”The Berenstain Bears Get Cancer.”The last book that made you cry?“Bambi.”The last book that made you furious?“The Wealth of Nations.”Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?My wife once threw a book at me.You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?Great work is a mystery to us, and, as it’s mysterious, we have no vocabulary for discussing it, really, let alone discussing it with its creators. The fortunate ones are dead, so that, for example, we could not ask of Winslow Homer, “What induced you to put that shark there…?” The best thing I could say to a writer is the best thing he or she, or you, could say to me: “Pleased to meet you.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87

      by

      Women, sex and Jewish mothers were just some of the targets of his popular satirical writing in books, essays, screenplays and more.Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.“Never accept a compliment,” Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?”“Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”“I don’t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.Mr. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Greenburg’s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, “Something’s There” (1976), was praised by John Leonard in The New York Times for its “skeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world” look at the occult.“Fans of the author of ‘How to Be a Jewish Mother’ and ‘Scoring’ will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn’t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,” Mr. Leonard wrote. “He is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.”Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.Wanting to abandon Chicago’s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.He wrote a satirical version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title “The Snob’s Guide to Status Cars.” The publisher, Roger Price (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: “How do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?”A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, “I’ll write that.” Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg’s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O’Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Greenburg outside his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1998. He published more than a dozen books for adults and scores more for children.Librado Romero/The New York TimesA fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children’s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city’s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.“I visit schools constantly,” he said in an interview for the website of Harcourt Books (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in 2006. “I talk to kids. I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I’ve tried to put all three things in these books.”In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Greenburg admitted to missing some of the ego rewards of writing adult fiction, but insisted that writing children’s books had been deeply gratifying.“It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” he said. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books. That’s enough for a career right there.”Alex Traub More