Written Word & Silver Screen

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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 37° 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.