The film issue
As a C-list writer, one has to wear many hats, including, it turns out, the hat of someone who knows something about movies. In February, for example, I was really happy to be asked to write something for The Believer, because I had never written for them before. In fact this was my first time writing for any publication in San Francisco, a city apparently famous for having such a friendly literary scene that guests at a roast for Amy Tan were literally unable to think of anything insulting to say about her, even as a joke. “This is San Francisco literary life in a nutshell,” reported the New York Times:
a willingness to honor and an unwillingness to undermine. You could probably find mean-spirited, competitive writers here, the kind who make literature a blood sport and the literary life a conniving enterprise and a purely mercenary pursuit. But not without a serious hunt.
Hey guys! Yoo-hoo! I might be up here on a mountain, living on oatmeal and pretending that my cat can talk, but I do exist! Anyway, returning to The Believer… so OK, I was already out of my comfort zone, what with the working-with-nice-people and all (it’s true, by the way—they’re really nice), so just imagine my discomfiture when I learned that I was supposed to write something for their film issue! What do I know about film? Nothing! But I cleverly solved this problem by writing about movies that don’t exist, and the result, Missed Encounters with the Movies: Seven Unpublished Screenplays by Famous Intellectuals, just went up on Salon.com (as part of their new partnership with famous SF nice guys, McSweeney’s). I draw your attention particularly to Tony Millionaire’s rendering of the hero of Vladimir Nabokov’s unproduced screenplay, The Love of a Dwarf.
For those who can’t get enough unpublished screenplays by famous intellectuals, here is an eighth one, that got cut from the published version (meaning that Kracauer had a missed encounter with Missed Encounters):
In Paris in 1938, the Frankfurt School critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote a twenty-two–page treatment for a biopic of Jacques Offenbach. The script was based on Kracauer’s sociohistorical biography of the comic operettist, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1937), which locates the seeds of modern commodity culture in Offenbach’s social being. Kracauer was at that time best known for his critique of sport clubs, dancing girls, and movie palaces, which he characterized as a distraction-factory calculated to exploit the “spiritual homelessness” of the white-collar masses, gaining their complicity in the reproduction of capitalist ideology. MGM reportedly took out an option on the American edition of Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, but the film was never realized.
While I was wearing the film-writer hat, I also wrote for the Guardian about filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, who was himself very fond of hats, and liked to wear a birdcage on his head. In her memoirs, the actress Alla Demidova writes about the special hats Paradjanov made for her when she was playing Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard in Tbilisi. There were two hats in two boxes: a black hat called Asta Nielsen, inside a black hatbox with a collage titled Mourning for Black Caviar; and, in a lilac-colored hatbox, a lilac-colored hat made with a doily “that had once perhaps lain on some kind of a table.” The black hat was decorated with black feathers that Paradjanov claimed, implausibly, had once belonged to his mother. According to Demidova, Paradjanov passionately loved to give gifts, but was very poor, and would either steal things and give them to people, or make gifts out of garbage.
“It delighted him that I wore a hat,” Demidova recalls, of her first meeting with the great filmmaker, “because at that time nobody wore hats… How beautiful that is—hats! I will make everyone go around wearing hats. Hats. Hats.”
The director of The Cherry Orchard didn’t let Demidova wear either of the hats made by Paradjanov.
Tags: beards, birds, comparative literature, hats, publications
April 14th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Whoa. The implications of this are astonishing to me. (I’ve had a third can of Diet Pepsi—I feel nearly faint, in fact.) As n+1’s senior writer, at least since issue 6, do you feel that you are bolding crossing into the enemy’s camp with a tray of figs on a diplomatic peace mission? Will Keith and Marco begin co-writing a monthly “books read” column for The Believer now that you’ve put your toes in the water? Is this the first step in an n+1/Believer reconciliation? —Though to note, Damion Searls has also contributed to both mags. And both mags champion/blurb for Sam Lipsyte. Now that my brain has warmed up, I guess there may be more crossover than has been admitted in the past. Still. Tremulous.
I traveled seventy miles on country backroads to pick up the newest New Yorker today. (Admittedly, I was loafing about on the Indiana/Ohio border, deciding whether or not I really should drive far and wide to pick up a New Yorker.) My left arm is sunburned. But the hourly application of aloe has been worth it. I took care of Diet Pepsi Dos while reading about the food in Istanbul.
Treasures!
April 14th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Both Huxley and Sartre did make films, sort of. Huxley’s short story “The Gioconda Smile” was made into “A Woman’s Vengeance,” with Charles Boyer and Ann Blyth among others, directed by, wait for it, Zoltan Korda. And Sartre wrote the screenplay for a version of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” retitled “Les Sorcières de Salem,” with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. I saw it on the UC Berkeley campus, in Wheeler Aud (pre-Pacific Fim Archive), about 1960; it was really, really bad.