Gossip Central

Writers Guild of America Remembers Nora Ephron: Words Matter

At B. B. King’s on Sunday night, at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony, amidst a lot of foul-mouthed laughs and sober minded speeches, writer/ director Nora Ephron was remembered. As a young novelist, Meg Wolitzer attested, she received a most important recognition when Nora Ephron called to say she wanted to adapt her book, This is Your Life (1988), for film. Ephron, who died last summer of cancer, was a champion of young talent. When Lena Dunham got up to receive her prize for new series, she too spoke about Ephron seeking her out. The Girls originator and star also told a story when at 15 her mom took her to Caroline’s Comedy Club to hear Lisa Lampanelli.

Ferlinghetti: Not all Beat Poets are Beat

Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen Ginsberg were not as popular, and those of Jack Kerouac were mainly out of print. Present at the historic Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg’s reading of Howl galvanized a poetry movement, and Kerouac passed a bottle of tokay, Ferlinghetti took action suggesting he put Ginsberg’s beat epic into print. This was the official dawning of a particularly American avant-garde literary movement: especially as founder of City Lights Books, publishing house and iconic San Francisco store, Ferlinghetti was at the center of The Beat Generation.

Disaster is My Muse: Hannah Arendt and The Art of Spiegelman at the Jewish Film Festiva

Even in the age of terrorism, the terror of the last century’s The Holocaust, has not lost its hold on the artistic imagination. As the victims of The Shoah are remembered at the United Nations and in synagogues worldwide, films continue to shed light on that darkest hour of the twentieth century. The Jewish Film Festival, an annual collaboration between the Film Society at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum just ended with the New York premiere of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt, the writer/philosopher/educator, an émigré who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, famously coining the phrase, “the banality of evil.” 

Jack Kerouac’s Mother Tongue: On the Road and The Voice is All

Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters familiar to readers since 1957. In a further innovation, viewers will note that Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) talks to his mother (Marie Ginette-Guay) in a curious French, referencing Kerouac’s French Canadian roots. The writer, from an ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke a dialect called joual.

Interviewing surviving members of the beat generation in their research, the filmmakers spoke to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time that On the Road was published to become an overnight bestseller. The author of the memoir Minor Characters told them about her own study of Kerouac’s language. Looking for ways to give Sal speech, the filmmakers incorporated this source, reaching outside Kerouac’s text in creating French dialogue between mother and son. Recently published, Joyce Johnson’s new biography,The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, traces the development of Kerouac’s prose style, showing how his French freed him to create his famous spontaneous narrative.

On the Road: The Vehicle Gets a Tune Up

En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing was censored. “This book about the creative process, this ode to literature, got to me. The characters became my heroes,” he said noting too his current inspirations: poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima and Gary Snyder. So charming that Peggy Siegal now calls him her new BFF, Salles took on the making of this film, a project that has eluded Francis Ford Coppola for decades. In 2004, after he saw Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries, Coppola asked him to consider the un-filmable beat classic.

Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts at The Monkey Bar

If Penny Marshall’s honking nasalese leaps off the pages of her memoir, My Mother was Nuts, it’s not because she wrote the book. Rather, this is the work of a ghost writer, the best in the business, Todd Gold, said Marshall’s literary agent Daniel Strone of this well known secret. If he is writing Ann-Margret, he revealed, he’s playing the piano. If it’s Penny, he’s smoking and sipping martinis. He’s a chameleon. He’s Zelig.

This reporter is not spilling beans, simply separating the literary from the likes of celebrity memoirs, which have to be coaxed, cajoled, and bought into being. If I feared the demise of “the book” for the more ephemeral cyber publishing, Dan Strone assures me, there will always be a demand for celebrity memoirs, and none of their sort will spill their story for free. Whew! At least one book genre is here to stay.

Hampton Journal: Author’s Night Reads and Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef

 “Non-fiction for sale here,” hawked comedian Robert Klein, seated in a row of writers under the Author’s Night tent at Gardiner’s Farm this past Saturday. Readers crowded about, one wanting to know whether the location in his memoir’s title, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue, was in Brooklyn or the Bronx. The Bronx, said Klein, selling soft. Jeffrey Lyons was back with the paperback of his book; Dr. Ruth attended for the first time with what else, sex advice; other authors included David Margolick, Martin Amis, David Baldacci, Robert Caro, Dava Sobel, Ken Auletta, Sam Talbott, Lynn Sherr with Swim: Why We Love the Water. 

I’ll Have What She’s Having: Nora Ephron Remembered

“Hey Meg-a-la,” shouted Rosie O’Donnell, trying to get Meg Ryan’s attention at, yikes, Alice Tully Hall, just after the memorial tribute to writer, director Nora Ephron. Gathering in the lobby for pink champagne, the crowd looked like a who’s who of film, theater, and media: Bette Midler, Charlie Rose, Matthew Broderick, Rob Reiner, Larry David, Annette Bening, Lauren Bacall, Jon Hamm, Mike Nichols, to skim the surface of a very long list, including too Jenny Allen, Halley Feiffer, and Ilene Beckermann, author of the book on which Love, Loss, and What I Wore was based. And then of course her husband Nick Pileggi, and ex-husband Carl Bernstein; marriage to him was the inspiration for her novel, Heartburn. The book was so popular, even Paul Bowles living in Tangier wrote to me about how it made him laugh. 

Kerouac in Cannes: A Road Not Taken

I am pleased that the reports from Cannes about the On the Road, Walter Salles’ film are mainly favorable, although I have taken note that some say there is no inner world for the characters, that the film has no discernable plot, that it is overlong. I have been following this progress for at least a decade. When I interviewed Francis Ford Coppola in 2007 about his film, Youth Without Youth, I inquired as to its status; at that stage, several writers had attempted a screenplay including one by Russell Banks where he, Russell Banks, runs into Jack Kerouac in a bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and they spend a drunken week together. Francis looked me in the eye and asked, “Have you read the book? It is impossible to script.” There were titters at the table of critics who were aware that I am a noted Kerouac scholar.

PEN World Voices: Kronos Quartet vs. A Trio of Scribes

Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum was meant to be a correspondence, an exploration of words and music featuring the Kronos Quartet and the writers Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, but to most ears there was a friendly cacophony. Salman Rushdie, president of PEN introduced the much anticipated event noting that the World Voices Festival began in the midst of President Bush’s second administration when the dialogue between this country and others was breaking down. As the world has changed, a new U.S. president seemed to brighten attitudes toward America from all over the world. Still repression prevails: Satrapi’s film which had been shown on Tunisian television is now banned, the station’s head on trial for programming it. Echoing Kushner’s epic Angels in America, so prescient of current events, a Mormon presidential candidate’s gay aide is fired.