April Books

Sticking Place Books, in the meantime, has launched a fresh and breezily navigable site that’s currently alerting us to two new books from Jonathan Rosenbaum, Camera Movements That Confound Us and Travels in the Cities of Cinema, a collection of conversations with Ehsan Khoshbakht. Another new Sticking Place title, Ian Christie’s What Made Cinema? Essays on Visual Culture and Early Film, is one of six books Pamela Hutchinson writes about at Silent London. It’s “a typically invigorating read,” writes Hutchinson. Christie “has an eye for personalities as much as the process.”

Last year saw two adaptations of novels by Sigrid Nunez: Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, based on What Are You Going Through (2020), and Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, adapted from the 2018 book. “If The Room Next Door takes liberties with plot and character,” writes Sarah Chihaya in the Nation, “it also manages to carry off the critical Nunez reader and transform them into a rapt Almodóvar viewer. The Friend, however, offers a very different experience. I found myself doing what I try to avoid when watching a film adaptation: comparing it at every point to the novel. And that is because The Friend’s fidelity to the novel is so smugly completist—so sure that it has an answer to all of the text’s original open questions and vacancies—that it practically begs you to do so.”

“The Hedgehog,” adapted last year by Gu Changwei, is the first of Zheng Zhi’s stories to be published in English. In the Paris Review, Zheng, whose fifth novel will be out later this year, tells Owen Park how the nature of online writing in China led him to screenwriting. “I realized,” he says, “that my random scribblings were more like film treatments than fiction—they were full of dramatic incidents and pacey narration and they had a strong visual element. They also had what we call ‘golden lines’—slogan-like bits of dialogue that the film studios loved.” Writing screenplays is a “painful” process, Zheng adds, but “I’m taking the movie business a bit more seriously. In fact, I’m in the process of transitioning from screenwriter to director.”

In the New York Times, Sarah Weinman looks back on the life of suspense novelist Ethel Lina White, “a powerhouse of the genre in the 1930s, publishing more than a hundred short stories and seventeen novels, three of which were adapted into films.” Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) is by far the most celebrated of the three; the other two are Lewis Allen’s The Unseen (1945), “adapted in part by Raymond Chandler,” and Robert Siodmak’s “noir chiller” The Spiral Staircase (1946).

Three adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not were made in Hollywood, beginning with Howard Hawks’s 1944 version with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Eddie Muller, whose latest book is Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir, is a recent guest on Guide for the Film Fanatic, talking about Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point (1950), which would be followed by Don Siegel’s The Gun Runners (1958).

Writing for Air Mail, Michele Stacy sketches a brief biography of novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Anita Loos and celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the “slender novel” that “captivated casual readers and literary giants alike,” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “the picaresque ‘diary’ of a gold-digging naïf, Lorelei Lee, and her cynical, sharp-tongued friend Dorothy.” Loos helped shepherd the book into a Broadway play in 1926, a silent film in 1928, and a musical in 1949 that served as the basis for Howard Hawks’s 1953 version starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

The latest book by the prolific film and theater historian Foster Hirsch has Geoffrey O’Brien reflecting in the New York Review of Books on the movies he grew up watching: “Whatever else it might be—by turns historical study, annotated syllabus for an intensive survey course, taxonomy of subgenres, trove of entertaining gossip, sporadic argument with off-screen interlocutors—Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is at heart an implicit memoir, revisiting a staggering array of movies as life experiences.”

While working on a Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting at UCLA, Colin Higgins wrote his thesis, Harold and Maude, and hoped to direct the film. Paramount went with Hal Ashby instead, and during the 1971 shoot with Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, Higgins turned the story into a novel. At the Reveal, Keith Phipps gently argues that the movie was better, playing “like the last expression of a ’60s counterculture that believed that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, goodhearted people could still carve out an oasis where freedom and individuality could thrive. Perhaps it was a nod to changing times that in Harold and Maude that oasis only has room for two.”

Griffin Dunne (After Hours) tells Casey Schwartz in the Washington Post that when he read Matthew Spektor’s 2013 novel American Dream Machine, he was “blown away by the way he captured Los Angeles, Hollywood, the film industry: how much his book tasted like the ’70s and early ’80s.” Spektor, the son of talent agent Fred Specktor (who, at ninety-two, is still working full-time at Creative Artists Agency) and the late screenwriter Katherine McGaffey Howe, has a new book out, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood. “Obviously, I am the fuse that burns through the stick of dynamite,” Spektor tells Schwartz, “but in the end, my personal story is a means to an end, of telling the story of what the movies meant. Used to mean . . . The movies were a public commons. The movies were something we all used to go do together.”

In an excerpt from Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend up at Vanity Fair, Jason Bailey talks with James Gandolfini’s costars in The Sopranos—Edie Falco, Steven Van Zandt, and Steve Schirripa—and several crew members about the many times that Gandolfini could not bring himself to get to the set and give all he wanted to give in his portrayal of New Jersey mafia boss Tony Soprano. “Nobody wants to be holding up a production,” says Falco. Gandolfini, who died in 2013, was a guy “in trouble. And coming from a place where there are quite a few of those people in my family, or there were, I have a great deal of empathy, sympathy, compassion. You wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

“I think it’s important to situate his film work within his own initial goals as an actor,” Bailey tells the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen. Gandolfini “fancied himself a character actor, a supporting player, and never envisioned the level of fame or stardom, and the assumption of further leading roles, that The Sopranos brought him . . . I think his range and versatility are vastly underrated, which mostly speaks to the huge shadow Tony cast over both his career and American popular culture in general.”

“In its printed physicality,” writes Nick Daoust in the Brooklyn Rail, Jonathan Hollingsworth’s Call Me Timothée “challenges the paradoxically ephemeral permanence—the digital footprints in the cyber-sand—of a last-season, by now household meme to the foremost unplugged: the celebrity look-alike contest.” Hollingsworth’s project, documenting an event that Timothée Chalamet himself showed up for last fall, is “either a meme, meme-ing its own approaching obsolescence by appropriating the art book, or a riot of erotics and fandom requiring the material timelessness of Polaroid and printed page.”

When it was released in 2000, Amores perros “represented a quantum leap in the audiovisual grammar of Mexican cinema,” writes Fernanda Solórzano. Now director Alejandro G. Iñárritu is revisiting the production of his first feature in Amores perros, a book slated for release in July and featuring contributions from directors Denis Villeneuve and Walter Salles, novelists Jorge Volpi and Wendy Guerra, film critic Elvis Mitchell, and the film’s storyboard artist Fernando Llanos.

September will bring Tim Greiving’s John Williams: A Composer’s Life, the first biography of the man best known for his collaborations with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and What’s with Baum?, the first novel by Woody Allen. The director of some of the most vital American films of the 1970s and ’80s has written five collections of short comic pieces and an autobiography, Apropos of Nothing (2020). Now, as he nears ninety, Allen will tell the story of Asher Baum, a journalist, novelist, and playwright ridden with anxiety and harboring a secret that could end his marriage.

Twelve years after the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s eighth novel, Bleeding Edge, the author’s ninth, Shadow Ticket, is slated to arrive on October 7. That will be a little over a week after the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which is rumored to be at least inspired by—if not actually based on—Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland. In 2014, PTA wrote and directed an adaptation of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009).

October will also see the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, Michael Witt’s survey of more than 380 never-completed works ranging from films and videos to books and exhibitions. Witt is a coeditor of For Ever Godard (2004) and the author of Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013).

For Book Cover Review, type designer Kimya Gandhi writes about Satyajit Ray’s cover for Sera Sandesh, a collection of stories first published in Sandesh, a Bengali children’s magazine cofounded by Ray’s grandfather. “Ray’s design language is bold, whimsical, sometimes deceivingly minimal, yet always deeply rooted in the visual culture of India,” writes Gandhi. “His film posters and book covers aren’t just pieces of art; they are an institution in itself for what Indian graphic design can be—a celebration of its identity while remaining universally resonant.”