The talk of Twitter today is the surprising announcement that HBO rejected the pilot for the planned series of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Not only does The Corrrections have that rare combination of popular appeal and critical acclaim, but the pilot was adapted and directed by Noah Baumbach, with a cast that included Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Opportunity missed?
To cheer you up with some good news, here are some upcoming literary screen projects on their way:
Charlie Kaufman will adapt The Knife of Letting Go, the first book in Patrick Ness’s YA trilogy Chaos Walking. A meeting of two great writers with strong cult followings; sure to be something worth seeing.
Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman are set to co-star as macho literary lion Ernest Hemingway and his feisty second wife Martha Gellhorn, a legendary war correspondent, in Hemingway and Gellhorn. Interesting casting.
The first pictures from Ang Lee’s forthcoming film of The Life of Pi were recently released. The film co-stars Gerard Depardieu, Adolfo Celi, Irrfan Khan, Adil Hussain and Tobey Maguire as the film’s narrator. The release date is December 2012.
Keira Knightley and Jude Law will star in Anna Karenina, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Director Joe Wright worked with Knightley in previous literary adaptations Atonement and Pride and Prejudice. Release is slated for November 2012.
Peter Jackson’s long-awaited The Hobbit will finally be released on Boxing Day 2012.
Scarlett Johansson will make her directorial debut with an adaptation of Truman Capote’s posthumously published novella, Summer Crossing. Her role will be strictly behind the camera, not in front of it.
And Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, filmed in Australia, will hit cinemas in January 2013.
Fans and sceptics alike will enjoy this chuckle-worthy breakdown of a typical Murakami novel. there’s cats, classical music, bizarre dream sequences and jazz. It’s all there; the only thing to disagree about is the percentages. Personally, we think 25% cats may be overstating it a bit.
Three years ago, architect and blogger John Bertram ran a competition asking designers to come up a better cover for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that has been often misinterpreted as portraying a teenage sexpot and seducer. ‘We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,’ says Bertram, who challenged the designers to do justice to its dark complexities. The competition has spawned its own book, with 60 new designs. A Salon article shares a few of them.
Four different cover designs for Lolita. From left to right: Barbara deWilde, Kelly Blair, Alkesander Bak, Jamie Kennan
We all know that The Hunger Games is the new Twilight, which was the new Harry Potter. When books strike such a chord with such a broad and populous fan base, they usually says as much about our culture – and the fears, desires, fantasies or questions it’s tapping into – as it does about the book or its author. On the eve of The Hunger Games movie, Salon’s Andrew O'Heihr takes a deeper look.
‘The Hunger Games taps into a vibrant current of pop culture and indeed of Western civilization in general, one that never really runs dry. It’s the idea that our species remains cruel and barbarous at heart, that the strong will always rule the weak by whatever means necessary, and that our collective obsession with sports and games and other forms of manufactured entertainment is a flimsy mask for sadism and voyeurism.’
The Hunger Games movie: the studio ‘eagerly awaits an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from teens, tweens and young adults all over the globe.’
Ten years after Fast Food Nation was published, Eric Schlosser reflects on what’s changed and what hasn’t. It’s sobering. He reports that the annual revenues of America’s fast-food industry have risen by about 20 per cent since 2001. The annual cost of the nation’s obesity epidemic (‘about $168 billion’) is, alarmingly, the same as the amount Americans spent on fast food in 2011. And in 2008, 143 million pounds of meat (one fourth of it purchased for federal school lunch and nutrition programs) had to be recalled.
On the other hand, there is a significant growth in those who are embracing a new food culture, championed by the likes of Alice Waters and recent Wheeler Centre guest Jamie Oliver, involving farmers' markets, organic food and school gardens. ‘The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-ridden, poor and obese has no historical precent,’ writes Schlosser, in a piece published by The Daily Beast.
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is now officially middle-aged: the series celebrates its 35th birthday this year. To mark the occasion, Maupin – whose life was so entwined with his stories that he used Michael Tolliver’s coming-out letter to his parents to come out to his own – has written a gorgeous reflective piece for the Guardian. He was often at odds with his editors over his insistence that ‘gay folks’ were part of the human landscape and deserved equal billing in his chronicle of modern life. ‘One of them even kept an elaborate chart in his office to insure that the homo characters in Tales didn’t suddenly outnumber the hetero ones and thereby undermine the natural order of civilisation.’
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City started as a newspaper series. ‘There were times when he was barely two days ahead of his readers.’
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
Fans of Game of Thrones, the series based on George R.R. Martin’s novels, shouldn’t miss eyeballing the medieval feast staged to celebrate the DVD release. But they might want to miss out on actually eating it. Complete with bloodied pigs’ heads, ‘eyeballs’ and ‘dragon’s eggs’ drizzled with liquid gold, it’s a feast for the eyes, but not one that will necessarily work up an appetite.
‘Anything about chopping dudes up, I’m into that,’ says chef Grant King, who hopes to make Darth Vader in chocolate next.
Rachel Cusk’s latest memoir, Aftermath, about her separation from her husband of ten years, includes lines like, ‘My husband said he wanted half of everything, including the children. No, I said … They’re my children … They belong to me.’ Cusk caused a scandal – and spawned the ‘mummy memoir’ genre – with her brutally self-analytical memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work, in 2001. She sharply divided critics, who either loved or hated her for laying bare the dark side of motherhood. The Guardian says of Aftermath (April): ‘She has again mined her life and told of her experience of being a woman, in a Read the extract and make up your own mind.
Rachel Cusk: ‘If there is a disjuncture between how women live and how they actually feel – which to me there is, in motherhood and marriage – I will feel entitled to attempt to articulate it.’
Stephen Colbert is making bookish news this week, after a gag during a two-part interview with Maurice Sendak (which he began by saying ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’) has turned into a book deal. After pitching an idea for a sequel, While the Wild Things Are: Still Wildin’ (starring Vin Diesel), Colbert joked he was writing a picture-book-in-verse, I Am a Pole (and So Can You!) and read a preview aloud. Sendak, who told Colbert that most children’s books are ‘very bad’, admitted, ‘The sad thing is, I like it.’ So did Grand Central Publishing, who has signed him up, with a publication date of 8 May 2012. ‘It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a children’s book,’ said Colbert. ‘I hope the minutes you and your loved ones spend reading it are as fulfilling as the minutes I spent writing it.’
Stephen Colbert: ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’.
Wondering what to read this year? Readings’ Martin Shaw has asked a handful of Australian writers to share the books they’re most looking forward to in 2012 for a series of posts for Kill Your Darlings. Nam Le is looking forward to new books from Chloe Hooper, Hilary Mantel and Richard Ford – and the second novel from Rachel Kushner. And there were multiple mentions of Texts in the City host Ruby Murray’s first novel, Running Dogs (Scribe, May) and Paddy O’Reilly’s Fine Colour of Rust (Harper Collins, March), which will be released simultaneously in Australia and the UK. Israeli comic short-story writer Etgar Keret, who will be appearing at the Wheeler Centre next month, also earned a nod for his new collection Suddenly a Knock at the Door, which got a rave review in last weekend’s Australian.
Etgar Keret: The Australian says, ‘There is method in Keret’s madness, and genius, too.’
In the lead-up to this week’s Oscars, the Independent talked to five novelists about their books’ transitions from page to screen. Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants, said director Alexander Payne ‘met my whole family, and they all ended up being in the movie’. He said, ‘Almost every line of dialogue was right out of the book, every sequence, the music I’d mentioned, the clothes they wore, the places they went to.’ Lionel Shriver thinks Lynne Ramsay’s movie of We Need to Talk About Kevin is ‘rather wonderful’, though ‘the movie does lean towards Kevin being evil from birth, whereas that’s more up for grabs in the novel’. Fay Weldon, however, enjoyed the money for the rights to her book The Life and Loves of a She Devil, but says the movie (starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep) ‘missed the point entirely’. She’d still do it again, though.
‘I still see myself as a struggling writer,’ says Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants
We began our Monday morning at the Wheeler Centre with a bit of a giggle, after stumbling on a very funny website that brings literary characters to (startlingly) real life.
The creator of The Composites has gone through some of literature’s most beloved books – and run passages describing their characters through police composite sketch software. The results are very different from Hollywood imaginings of the same characters.
Flaubert described Emma Bovary thus:
She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.
Here is Emma Bovary, as imagined by The Composites:
And here she is, as imagined by Hollywood in 1949 (played by Jennifer Jones):
And by the BBC in 2000 (played by Frances O’Connor):
This clever little exercise by The Composites is a bit of fun, but it’s also a stark illustration of the issues that can arise in translating the world of the page – which leaves gaps for the reader’s imagination – to the visual realm.
What’s a more faithful translation: the strict adherence to details that results in the eerie police sketches of The Composites, or those of film and television makers? The latter tend to present unusually attractive versions of even the most ordinary characters – using props such as messy hair, sloppy cardigans, glasses or unflattering make-up to signal that they’re supposed to be ordinary mortals.
Sandra Bullock (with Tom Hanks) in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Glasses, messy hair and minimal make-up make her ‘ordinary’.
So, a literary character made flesh is almost always more glamorous than the version on the page. But then again, Emma Bovary is an attractive, charismatic woman – not reflected at all in the strangely empty composite sketch, but captured in the screen versions. It’s the essence of the character rather than their physical description that’s most important, surely?
One of the most controversial literary casting decisions of recent times was that to cast British-Nigerian actor Sophie Okonedo as Aisha in The Slap. This meant her character’s background was changed from Indian to Mauritian. Some fans of the book protested, but author Christos Tsiolkas was unbothered. What mattered for Tsiolkas, said producer Robert Connolly, was that ‘Aisha regards herself as an outsider to mainstream Australia, a common bond that links her to Hector and his close-knit Greek family’. And she did a brilliantly job of capturing ‘Aisha’. Carbon-copy looks had little to do with it.
As The Slap writer Kris Myrska told the Wheeler Centre, translation from literature (or real life) to the screen often has nothing to do with upping the glamour quotient – decisions can be made for practical reasons, like how difficult a scene is to shoot. Also a writer on The King, the telemovie about the life of Graeme Kennedy, Myrska said complaints made about the ‘accuracy’ of that show included that Kennedy was depicted drinking brown spirits, when he preferred white. Why? ‘Clear fluid reads as water on the screen, while brown liquid says booze.’
Jonah Hill as Peter Brand (based on Paul DePodesta) in Moneyball
In Moneyball, an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s non-fiction book, similar casting decisions were made for practical reasons. Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, whose real-life counterpart, Paul DePodesta, asked to have his name changed for the movie. The real-life DePodesta looks nothing like the chubby, child-like Hill; he’s lean and handsome. And far from being an Ivy League baseball outsider (like Hill’s character), he started his career as an advance scout for the Cleveland Indians. But the script – and the casting decision – made changes to amp up the dramatic contrast with Brad Pitt’s golden boy Billy Beane. ‘I was jarred by it when I first heard it, and then I thought, “My god, it could be brilliant,”’ Michael Lewis told Hollywood Reporter. ‘[Jonah Hill] is physically so unlike everybody else in this environment that it has a metaphoric power and it works brilliantly. His performance is spectacular.’
Paul DePodesta
Sometimes it’s the other way round. What works on the page doesn’t ring true when translated too faithfully to the screen. Reviewing Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in the New Yorker recently, David Denby made just this point. He called the film, about a bright 11-year-old boy coping with his father’s 9/11 death in his own eccentric fashion, ‘an example of what happens when an author’s fluent literary conceits give way to the sight of all-too-human people moving and talking in the real-world spaces of a movie’:
‘Onscreen … the sound of a hyper-articulate boy talking semi-nonsense becomes very hard to take … Embodied, Oskar is a pain. After a while, we find ourselves thinking not of grief but of entitled kids who have been praised for every bright remark they’ve ever made.’
Of course, not everyone agrees with Denby – the film is nominated for Best Picture in this year’s Oscars race. Six of nine nominees in the category are literary adaptations.
And it’s been suggested recently that, in the wake of The Slap’s success, more screen adaptations could provide a much-needed boost to Australian books.
It seems that, for all its issues, the relationship between page and screen is more popular than ever.
In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.
It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.
‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’
In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.
‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.
He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.
Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.
It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.
Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.
The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).
Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.
Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).
Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’
Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)
This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.
The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.
Is it too soon? Just 11 years after it was first brought to screen, Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho is set to be remade. Variety reported last week that Lionsgate has a remake of the film in the early stages of development. The news prompted Ellis to tweet, “I have warned Lionsgate that I will not approve a new version of "American Psycho” unless it stars SCOTT DISICK or MILES FISHER.“ Watch the video of Bret Easton Ellis' 2010 appearance at the Wheeler Centre.
Meanwhile, not-so-young adults who enjoy reading young adult fiction – and there are a lot of us who do – may recognise themselves in a new film starring Charlize Theron. Written by Juno writer Diablo Cody, Young Adult tells the story of the author of young adult novels who goes to great lengths to seduce her high school boyfriend, who’s now married with a young child. Here’s a glowing review of the film by a writer of young adult novels.
What would Shakespeare’s plays have looked like had they been published as kids' books? Maybe something like this.
The reviews are starting to come in on the film adaptation, by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, of The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, the classic detective-adventure hero whose eponymous books have sold 350 million copies. Tintin’s creator was a Belgian artist, Georges Prosper Remi, who published under the pseudonym Hergé. He began improvising the the adventures of his eternally adolescent hero in 1929 at the tender age of just 22, although a mural discovered in 2007 of a Tintin-like Scout character called Totor drawn by a teenage Hergé indicates Tintin had long been on his mind.
Hergé’s boy’s-own plotting, pacing, characterisation, sense of humour and drawing style – an economic blend of the stylised and the realistic – proved popular. He continued to draw Tintin strips until his death in 1983, at times taking risks with the format’s generic conventions as audacious as his hero’s adventures. In The Castafiore Emerald (1962), for example, there is much action but there is no plot. And the final Tintin book drawn by Hergé, the unfinished Alph-Art, was a genre-defying exploration of the world of modern art.
Detail of a mural drawn by a 15 year-old Hergé of Totor, a progenitor of Tintin, via the World Scout Bureau
The film is an adaptation of three Tintin books, The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Interestingly, these three titles were published between 1940 and 1943, in the midst of the second World War, when Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Crab with the Golden Claws was the first of six Tintin adventures written under the occupation. It was serialised in a French-language newspaper that was the official mouthpiece of the Nazis in Belgium during the war after the Germans closed the newspaper that had previously published Tintin. To avoid controversy, Hergé dropped his habit of scripting adventures based on current events and began using more exotic plot devices, such as the mystery and treasure hunt that animate The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Although his politics were on the whole humanist and mainstream, Tintin’s ideological tendencies varied from the anti-corporate left to the anti-Semitic far right. Anti-Semitic frames were originally published in the newspaper edition of The Shooting Star, another wartime Tintin adventure, but were later expunged in the book version.
After Belgium was liberated, Hergé was interrogated on suspicion of having been a collaborator. His defence was that he’d simply done his job, much like a plumber. Later, in a 1973 interview, he accepted more responsibility: “I recognize that I myself believed that the future of the West could depend on the New Order. For many, democracy had proved a disappointment, and the New Order brought new hope. In light of everything which has happened, it is of course a huge error to have believed for an instant in the New Order.”
Reviews of the film have been largely positive, praising its thrill-a-minute pacing. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks, on the other hand, had a quasi-existential reaction to the film, lamenting the lifelessness of the 3D characters on celluloid: “How curious that Hergé achieved more expression with his use of ink-spot eyes and humble line drawings than a bank of computers and an army of animators were able to achieve… There on the screen we see Hergé’s old and cherished protagonists, raised like Lazarus and made to scamper anew. But the spark is gone, their eyes are dusty, and watching their antics is like partying with ghosts. Turn away; don’t meet their gaze. When we stare into the void, the void stares back at us.”
Cover of a 1947 propaganda comic book, via Wikipedia
Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton, co-hosts of the ABC’s At the Movies, recently visited the Wheeler Centre to speak about the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, for our Texts in the City series. During their presentation, Stratton described the film as “nothing more or less than a justification for betraying your friends”.
In a profile of on the Waterfront’s director Elia Kazan published late in 2010, John Lahr wrote, “Between 1945 and 1962, onstage and on the screen, Kazan was, by his own admission, ‘the most successful director at work in America.’ A sort of entrepreneur of emotional complexity, he had a gift for releasing the articulate energy of actors and for turning psychology into behavior”.
Elia Kazan remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of cinema. He was undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s greatest and most influential directors. He was also willing to give testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, identifying friends and colleagues he knew to have been members of the Communist Party, and destroying their careers in the process.
(Click to watch video.)
(Click to watch video.)
He’s written 24 novels and created two of crime and mystery fictions best-known contemporary heroes, Harry Bosch and Micky Haller. In Australia alone, as of early 2011, he’d sold 1.25 million books. His novels now sell an average of 85,000 copies. He’s Michael Connelly, a colossus of his – and indeed any – literary genre, and in this video he’s in conversation with the Wheeler Centre’s head of programming, Michael Williams.
How did it all begin? “I got interested in crime when I was 16 and I was witness to part of a crime, and I spent a night in a police station dealing with detectives… After that night I started reading crime news and newspapers, I started reading non-fiction books about crime, and then I got to fiction.” Connelly attributes the start of his literary crime obsession to Raymond Chandler, whom he came across at university: “Something about reading those books was like an epiphany or a light going off.” He read all of Chandler’s novels in little more than a fortnight, and a career was born.
The Wheeler Centre, in partnership with the Melbourne International Film Festival, will be hosting UK film critic Adrian Wootton in five events, in one of which he’ll be speaking about Raymond Chandler on the silver screen.
The Shakespeare authorship question is perhaps literature’s most famous and enduring conspiracy theory. Since its birth in the early 19th century, some 70 different candidates have been proposed as being the ‘real’ author of Shakespeare’s works. Anonymous, a film exploring the controversy about the authenticity of Shakespeare’s penmanship, debuted last week. Here’s a report on one of literature’s oldest conspiracy theories, and here’s the trailer.
The posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King was the publishing event of the year so far (covered at length by the Dailies). How do you go about making a movie out of DFW’s best-known novel, Infinite Jest? One intrepid film-maker, Chris Ayers, is ‘doing’ just that with an ambitious project called Poor Yorick Entertainment, the name of the fictional independent film company started by James O. Incandenza in the novel.
We reported some time ago on the publishing phenomenon of a mock-children’s bedtime book called Go the F—– to Sleep, which was a bestseller before it was published, based on preorders alone. The leaking of the ebook seems only to have helped sales. The phenomenon continues with news that Samuel L. Jackson has recorded an audio version of the book, and Werner Herzog is to follow. Werner Herzog narrates his own documentaries – the best-known of which is Grizzly Man – in a lugubrious but oddly comforting voice over that has spawned some amusing parodies (‘Werner’ on Madeline and Where’s Waldo?)
The video of a conversation between Herzog and fellow documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War) has just been published.
The Wheeler Centre in partnership with the Melbourne International Film Festival’s MIFF 37º South Market & Accelerator program, presents ‘Adrian Wootton on Film’, a series of five lectures by critic and Film London chief executive Adrian Wootton. The lectures will take place from July 25 to July 28.
Poster of a Coffs Harbour Amateur Theatrical Society adaptation of Cloudstreet
A Perth-based fan of the Tim Winton classic Cloudstreet believes she’s narrowed the location of Tim Winton’s much-loved novel to the inner-city suburb of West Leederville. Heidi Ciriello has identified West Leederville’s Kimberley Street as the most likely location of the flaking mansion shared for two decades by the Pickles and Lambs.
The report of readers scouring the streets of a city in search of a house that might or might not be the template for a house in a book is testament to the place the novel holds in many readers' hearts. In a review of a three-part television adaptation in the May edition of The Monthly, MJ Hyland wrote of the novel, “Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is a compassionate masterpiece, which is to Australians what George Orwell’s 1984 is to the English and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird is to Americans.” In fact, in 2003, Cloudstreet topped an ABC/Australian Society of Authors poll of Australians' favourite Australian books. The following, it placed fifth in the ABC’s My Favourite Book promotion, ranking Australians' favourite books from anywhere. The book has also been adapted for the stage by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo.
Poster of a Castle Hill Players adaptation of Cloudstreet
The second part of the Cloudstreet adaptation, with a screenplay written by the author, airs this Sunday night on the cable channel Showtime. The adaptation has received mixed reviews. The Australian’s Michael Bodey has called the lead performances “inch-perfect”, characterising the lavish production “one of the best miniseries that we’ve produced here, [recalling] some of the best stuff Kennedy-Miller made in the 80s.” Hyland wrote, “Most of the novel’s deft magic is only thinly realised in what is often rushed and superficial summary.” Here’s what the publicity-shy Tim Winton makes of it all and here’s a Slow TV interview with director Matthew Saville on adapting the novel for the small screen.
Nine-metre bronze sculptures of Saddam Hussein in the grounds of the Republican Palace, Baghdad, 2005, by Kim Gordon, USDoD, via WikiCommons
The comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen is making a film based on a book by Saddam Hussein. The film, due to be released in May 2012, has the working title of The Dictator, and is based on a book written by the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Agence France Presse reports that the creator of the comic characters Ali G, Borat and Brüno will be adapting a novel believed to have been written by Saddam – if not actually by the man, at least by ghostwriters under his supervision.
According to Wikipedia, Zabibah and the King was first published anonymously in 2000, but its true authorship was easily divined when, soon after publication, it was announced that the novel would be adapted for the stage and screen (a 20-part television series, no less). One Amazon reviewer describes the plot as being about an “intimate friendship between a lonely, unhappy king and an unusually perceptive and spirited peasant girl [that] paves the way for the abolition of a decadent monarchy and the establishment of a popular government.”
As well as occasionally turning his pen to poetry, Saddam Hussein is commonly believed to have written and published four novels. In a 2004 review of Be Gone Demons!, Iraqi novelist and critics Ali Abdel Amir concluded, “[Saddam] was completely out of touch with actual reality, and novel writing gave him the chance to live in delusions.” Saad Hadi was one of the ghostwriting team who helped Saddam write. He says Saddam was deeply influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The dictator had a peculiar method: “He’d sit in his state room and recount simple tales, while his aides recorded his words.”
Other dictators to have tried their hand at literature include Muammar Gaddafi (Escape to Hell and Other Stories) and Kim Jong-Il, who wrote 1500 books as a university student.
For one writer, the novels speak volumes about dictatorship and its failings. US conservative Daniel Pipes, for whom Saddam Hussein was at one time an obsession, has written that hubris and ignorance are hallmarks of dictatorships. “Both these incapacities worsen with time and the tyrant becomes increasingly removed from reality. His whims, eccentricities and fantasies dominate state policy. The result is a pattern of monumental mistakes.” Or, as Guardian journalist Leo Benedictus put it, “No matter how powerful they become, it seems there is one thing that no despot can ever have: an honest editor.”
Detail of Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate, released last week
There’s no body. The body was hastily dumped. The photos are too inflammatory to be released. He resisted. He was unarmed. The death of Osama bin Laden is proving as fertile a ground for conspiracy theorists as the 9/11 tragedy. No longer can conspiracy theories be easily dismissed as white noise on the fringes of political debate – in fact, they play an increasingly central role in public discourse. There are dozens of them. Most of them are harmless, but some can fuel the flames of hatred. Two conspiracy theories in particular have loomed large in recent times.
Some climate change sceptics see a conspiracy theory lurking behind global warming. This conspiracy theory sees a cabal of researchers overplaying the causes and effects of climate change, angling for more grants, while government apparatuses hungry for more control seize the opportunity presented by the scientific cabal to extend the tentacles of their power. Of course, this conspiracy theory cuts both ways.
And recently, US property tycoon Donald Trump launched a high-profile presidential bid by weighing into the birther controversy that has plagued President Obama since his election. Trump’s bid proved short-lived after the White House finally released Obama’s long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. President Obama took the opportunity at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner to roast Trump: “No-one is happier – no-one is prouder – to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focussing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
Trump responded to the certificate’s release by moving the focus of his attention to President Obama’s academic record, suggesting he got into Harvard University on the grounds of skin colour rather than merit. This led various celebrities to accuse Trump of racism – a Hollywood version, perhaps, of dog-whistle politics.
University of New South Wales mathematician James Franklin yesterday asked why the human mind is such fertile ground for the seed of conspiracy. Powerlessness and the joy of revealing ‘hidden’ truths are chief among his reasons. Another is the ultimate unprovability of conspiracy theories, which sometimes turn out to be no less fanciful than actual conspiracies – like Castro’s exploding cigars or MKULTRA. If, in the words of David Foster Wallace, truth and fiction are equally strange, then we are plunged into a world where they are indistinguishable – the paranoid world, in psychoanalytic terms, of psychosis.
Psychologists have tried to explain the phenomenon. Belief in a conspiracy theory may well be a desperate attempt to escape the logical cul-de-sac triggered by cognitive dissonance, when the gap between what we want to believe and the evidence before us can no longer be spanned. Or maybe it’s just a normal part of trying to understand an increasingly complex world: “humans remain hard-wired to look for patterns in a chaotic universe”, according to political commentator Daniel Drezner.
Ultimately, a conspiracy theory survives for as long as it is useful – and the best conspiracy theories survive because they’re useful to everyone. They cast a spell on adepts and sceptics alike. The scorn of non-believers is just grist to the mill for the believers, reinforcing rather than corroding their certainty. And sceptics find them useful too, using them to marginalise dissent and prop up their own world-view.
But here’s a conspiracy theory for you, the biggest one of all: in this one, we’re all conspiracy theorists. You want proof? Here’s proof: our insatiable hunger for stories, for narratives and fables, for theatre, literature and cinema. There are countless books and films that feed on conspiracies, from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Foucault’s Pendulum – but we’re talking about something bigger. Much bigger. Something so big, the government doesn’t want you to know about it. Maybe, just maybe, the part of the human brain that knows that seeing isn’t always believing, that power is corrupting, and that categories like history, facts and even knowledge itself are fluid and manipulable, is the same part of the brain that we use to build stories – stories that have us always wanting to know what happens next, turning the next page and the one after that, ever deeper into the infinite night.
(Click to watch video.)
What happens when women get behind a camera? How do they use cameras to cast a fresh look on the world around them? Organised by the Melbourne Centre of International PEN to mark 2011’s International Women’s Day, ‘She Must be Seeing Things’ featured an illuminating presentation by film critic and academic Deb Verhoeven. Exploring the relationship between activism and filmmaking, Deb asked, what role can the cinema play in societies that don’t even have them?
Could we have just witnessed the birth of virtual reality tourism? Television channel 13th Street Universal, which specialises in thriller and crime content, has produced an augmented reality film called The Witness. The film is one part film, one part public event, one part interactive video game and one part city tour – in this instance, Berlin. Touted as “the first movie of the outernet”, the film, which can only be viewed on an iPhone, has a storyline that with themes including organised crime, kidnapping and sex trafficking. According to blogger Benjamin Starr, viewer-participants become witnesses to a kidnapping: “It’s then their job to track down the victim, finding clues, communicating with other participants and viewing other scenes on location”.
At this stage, the ‘film’ can only be experienced as a German language only organised event. Applications for the next ‘screening’ open April 9 – all part of an innovative campaign to promote the relaunch of the German 13th Street television channel. The mind boggles at the possibilities: filmmakers and game developers making augmented reality interactive films for cities across the world – and tourists travelling to a city specifically to experience the best and most popular games.
A Long Island mansion believed to have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy Buchanan’s abode is set to be razed. In the novel, the house is in East Egg and faces Gatsby’s palace in West Egg. In real life, the 1902 property is in Sands Point, has 25 rooms and is set to be demolished because of rising land taxes and maintenance costs. It’s just the latest in hundreds of such historic homes on Long Island to have suffered the same fate for similar reasons. It will be replaced by five houses worth $10 million each.
The news comes hot on the heels of an announcement of another film project based on the novel. Pre-production begins this month in Sydney on film director Baz Luhrmann’s 3D version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. Filming is expected to start in August. The film will star Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. It will be the novel’s seventh adaptation for the screen, but it will boast a few firsts, including the first to have been produced in Australia and the first to have been shot in 3D. The most famous, the third, made in 1974, starred Robert redford and Mia Farrow, and the sixth was a Korean version. There seems to be an especially Australian connection with the classic novel of the great American dream – illustrator Nicki Greenberg’s adaptation of the novel in graphic form has been highly successful.
(Image via WikiCommons)
The Daily Beast reports that 15 previously unknown stories by the legendary writer Dashiell Hammett are due to be published following their discovery. The man who popularised the hard-boiled detective fiction genre (and created Sam Spade) wrote 5 novels and many stories. In 1998, The Maltese Falcon was ranked at 56 in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.
In a piece of sleuthing worthy of Sam Spade, Andrew F. Gulli, editor of The Strand magazine, discovered the stories in a collection of Hammett archival material bequeathed to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The first of the stories will be published by The Strand.
The news coincides with the release of a biography of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart brought Sam Spade to the screen in The Maltese Falcon in 1941, a film said to have one of the most complicated plots in film history. Its penultimate line (“The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of” – improvised by Bogart and intended as a reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest) has entered movie folklore.
(Dunwich Marshes, Suffolk, via WikiCommons)
Fans of WG Sebald’s melancholic masterpiece The Rings of Saturn will be curious to see how two English filmmakers have transposed the book for the screen. Sebald, a Suffolk-based German writer, had a meteoric rise to late-career literary fame cut short when after a car accident 9 years ago. In 1992, he undertook a walk for a few days through the Suffolk countryside following a spell in hospital. Although sometimes called a novel and sometimes a travelogue, the book that he wrote inspired by the walk is actually an innovative mix of the two. It remains unique simply because no other writer has ever matched its mix of gloom and dazzling learning.
The Rings of Saturn has continued to inspire writers and artists ever since. In 2007 seven British artists exhibited work inspired by Sebald and his tome. Now two documentarians – Stuart Jeffries and Grant Gee – have made a film loosely based on The Rings of Saturn (preview courtesy of the Guardian). The world premiere of Patience (After Sebald) takes place tonight at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, as part of After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment, a weekend-long programme of events exploring WG Sebald’s work.
Christos Tsiolkas' 2005 book Dead Europe is to be made into a film, Inside Film reports. The book’s plot follows protagonist Isaac as he’s besieged by his Greek heritage when he makes a trip to Europe and discovers his familiy’s curse.
Beginning production in 2011, the film will be directed by Tony Krawitz, best known for his production Jewboy. It will be a busy year for Krawitz as he’s also releasing his documentary The Tall Man based on the novel by Chloe Hooper. Also attached to the film are writer Louise Fox and producers Emile Sherman and Iain Canning.
With Tsiolkas' The Slap being adapted for television and his previous book Loaded filmed as Head On, the Greek Australian writer is almost as successful on the screen as he is on the page.
Poster for the 1992 film
Over at Vulture, they’re saying Warner Brothers will “reboot Buffy as a movie franchise” with 29-year-old Whit Anderson as scriptwriter. Anderson has told fans, “While this is not your high-school Buffy, she’ll be just as witty, tough and sexy as we all remember her to be.”
Whedon, a recent guest at Melbourne Writers Festival, created the original 1992 film and went on to write the cult TV for 7 years. Whedon apparently wasn’t interested in going over old ground. According to EW, “I believe [the producers] did ultimately reach out to my agent after the news broke. I think that’s something better left untouched by me. So, I wish them luck.”
Punctuation can tell you a lot about a person, but at Slate Nathan Heller has traced the rise and fall of film director Woody Allen all through his use of the humble comma.
“Bafflingly mispunctuated” poster from Woody Allen
Heller argues that Allen’s films were at their best when the titles used more punctuation, citing What’s New Pussycat?, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and the “rigourously punctuated” Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex/ But Were Afraid To Ask. For Heller the wheels fall off with Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You which he tetchily dismisses as “a title that shifts, with no punctuation, from third-person citation to first-person direct quotation” though he also thinks one of the problems was that it “also required Julia Roberts to sing”.
By 2008’s “bafflingly mispunctuated” Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Heller concludes the “golden age of Allen – for the grammar-minded moviegoer, at least – was over”. Heller does conclude that punctuation may have found an unlikely new heir in Justin Beiber. Helller concludes that the Canadian pop star’s new book entitled Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever: My Story is the worst example of “highly irregular, morally suspicious colon deployment”.
Andrew Weldon looks at how everyone’s a film critic. This cartoon is excerpted from Andrew Weldon’s I’m So Sorry Little Man I Thought You Were a Hand Puppet.
The LA Times has run a first-person piece from Fred Fox Jr, the man who wrote the infamous episode of Happy Days when Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli jumped a shark. It’s become an expression to mark when a TV show tipped into disrepute, but Fox thinks it’s one of the biggest misnomers in TV history.
Fox points out that far from being a death knell for the show, when the Fonz (played by Henry Winkler) water skied over a shark the show was at its peak. The episode itself was “was a huge hit… [with] an audience of more than 30 million viewers”. Fox said that if the episode represented a creative nadir then “why did the show stay on the air for six more seasons?”
Subsequently the rise of the expression to jump the shark, left Fox “embarrassed… but this feeling passed quickly, and I likened the popularity to a new fad, where someone jumps on the proverbial bandwagon and soon everyone is doing it.”
Fox insists the real motivation for the jump was not about scoring ratings. Part of the reason someone (Fox doesn’t remember who came up with the idea exactly) suggested the shark jump was because “Henry [Winkler] water skied in real life”.
Film maker Gillian Armstrong
Last night saw the first session of Critical Failure, the Wheeler Centre’s week-long discussion on the state of Australia’s reviewing culture.
The conversation extended onto Twitter with a few tweets clustering around the hashtag #critfail.
Panellist Adrian Martin impressed film blogger gerardelson who tweeted two quotes from Martin: “Mass media is absolute mediocrity.” and “Real film criticism has always happened elsewhere.” Owen Vandenberg found more in common with Mel Campbell as he tweeted “I think we need more and better genre films, but I don’t hate the bad ones.”
But by far the most active Twitter correspondent of the evening was James Nolen who highligted some of the panel’s exemplars as critics. Nolen tweeted “Gillian Armstrong hearts Margaret and David’s reviews (more so Maggies)” and pointed out Chris Fujiwara as one of Adrian Martin’s favourite reviewers. Other film critics recommended by the panel were US favourite Roger Ebert, the New York Times‘ AO Scott and Manohla Dargis. The Age’s Phillipa Hawker (along with David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz) were among the few Australian critics praised by the panel.
In case you missed this session, a video will be online in the next week.
Andrew Weldon on films that criticise back. Taken from the book, I’m So Sorry Little Man I Thought You Were a Hand-Puppet.
This cartoon is excerpted from Andrew Weldon’s I’m So Sorry Little Man I Thought You Were a Hand Puppet.
Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner star in On The Beach; screening at ACMI this weekend
Where the Wild Things Are: the original book, by Maurice Sendak
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