R.I.P. Budd Schulberg

Our thoughts and condolences go out to his family and friends and fellow fans. In memory of the man, we're re-running a 2007 piece we did on Hollywood's continued failure to adapt Schulberg's book, What Makes Sammy Run?

What Makes Sammy Stall?

One of my favorite novels about Hollywood is Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? It's the no-punches-pulled story of an amoral hustler who works his way up the Tinseltown ladder to become the head of a film studio. It's also one of the rare books that I could see having a successful screen adaptation, as Schulberg's acclaimed work as a screenwriter greatly influenced his approach to writing.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Over the years, everyone from Frank Sinatra to Ben Stiller has tried to bring Budd's book to the big screen. So what is it that has kept this project languishing in limbo for so long? Ego mostly, and a little fear. Back in the 40's when Sammy was originally published, the majority of the studio heads took personal offense over the material's damning portrayal of them. In an interview with American Legends, Schulberg says, "Sam Goldwyn didn't read the book, but was very hostile toward it. Louie Mayer tried to run me out of town. He hated the book. Mayer told my father he would ruin him for not stopping me from writing the novel." Decades later, little seems to have changed. In The Jewish Daily Forward, Schulberg blames Steven Spielberg for holding things up due to "the novel's negative presentation of studio moguls." Now, I'm just an East Coast kid, but even I know that talking trash about the world's biggest director may not be the best way to revive a stalled production. As Schulberg's fans are always being reminded, though, Budd's never been one to hold his tongue. In fact, it's this same complicated and controversial combination of personal/artistic fearlessness and social/political ignorance that has kept his work so vital.

To read The Independent's 2/9 interview with Schulberg, click here.

Recommended Viewing:Jennifer Baszile @ Google

Clipped from the YouTube entry:
Princeton grad/Yale professor Jennifer Baszile stopped by Google's New York office to discuss her book, A Memoir - The Black Girl Next Door.
Black Girl explores what happened during the early years of America's racial integration. As a thirty-something black woman, Baszile was part of the first generation of Americans born after lawmakers outlawed segregation and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined the dream of black and white children playing together. But after five hundred years of African American exclusion, no one knew how to make the dream a reality.
Baszile shares moments that confirmed the best hopes of the American Dream, and her family's relentless pursuit of achievement. She also looks inside her own family to understand how segregation, the underside of the American Dream, affected her parents' approach to everything from her hairstyle to dating.

Go, Look!

Fans of feminism, bondage, and the outsider art of Henry Darger will want to check out The Hooded Utilitarian's two-part piece on Wonder Woman creator, William Moulton. In it, blogger Noah Berlatsky playfully details the ways in which Moulton's 'particular fetishes and fantasies' have made the Wonder Woman character so troublesome for comics writers in the sixty-some-odd years since.
An excerpt:
Whereas Superman, Batman, Spider-man, etc., are to some extent just interchangeable adventure heroes, Wonder Woman stories were much more like something by Tom O’Finland or R. Crumb — that is, Moulton had an idiosyncratic vision based on his fairly explicit sexual kinks (basically strong woman, bondage, control, submission — that kind of thing). [...] Moulton made his stories about those fetishes and fantasies; that’s what he wanted to talk about, and in that context WW’s appearance (girly, uncovered), her tools (the magic lasso, the bracelets), and her contradictory image (powerful, but always being dominated), all make at least a kind of sense. His weird blend of feminism/misogyny (“I love strong women — tie them up so I may love them more!”) means you can’t get the feminism without the misogyny, but also means you can’t get the misogyny without the feminism.
Seriously, this is a wonderfully funny and informative piece. If you've never read any of Moulton's Wonder Woman stories, it will have you scouring ebay, looking for cheap, used comics. And for those of you already familiar with the mind of Moulton, it will offer added insight into the super-talented super-freak and his contradictory creation.
Click here for part one and part two.
Go, look!

Recommended Viewing:Jack Kirby on Jack Kirby

This is a clip from an out-of-print documentary called The Masters Of Comic Book Art. Harlan Ellison provides a brief introduction and biography.

"My inspirations were...I hadda make sales." Jack Kirby

Recommended Viewing:Talking Politics with Author/Former SpyJohn le Carré

part 2, part 3, part 4

Author du Jour:President of the United States, Barack Obama

Abbreviated Biography:
Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th President of the United States of America, and the first African American to be elected to this position. Not only that, dude loves books -- writing them and reading them!

Bibliography:
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Barack Obama in His Own Words

A brief clip of Obama talking about books/his favorite book as a child:


Additional Links:
NYTimes article: From Books, New President Found Voice
Amazon's Omnivorous Blog used the above article to compile the most up-to-date list of books Obama's mentioned and/or been seen reading.

Author du Jour: Jen Hadfield

Biography:
(lifted en masse from uk.poetryinternationalweb.org)
Hadfield was born in Cheshire in 1978. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003 and was given a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary in 2002 to help her complete her first collection Almanacs which was published by Bloodaxe in 2005. She used her Eric Gregory Award to fund a year's residence in Canada, where she has family, giving readings from Halifax to Vancouver. She continues to indulge her passion for getting words onto objects, and uses linocut, photography, woodwork, bookbinding and fly-tying in her artist books, which she calls “Rogue Seeds”.

Although an English writer, study, residence and travel in Scotland and Canada have been central to Hadfield's poetry thus far. Almanacs is a reassuringly different debut, hard to pin down, and with no signs of stepping in the prints of the previous generation. Kathleen Jamie has called her “a zestful poet of the road, a beat poet of the upper latitudes”, while Tom Leonard described “a quick mind abroad . . . a coquettish dance of nature’s primal forces . . . a whole and committed poet”.

Hadfield is certainly a nature poet, but a dazzling, contemporary one and her work never suffers from the shallow philosophizing or haughty self-reflection which undermines much poetry centred on landscape and travel. Even when set in remote places, her work is infused with colloquial speech, cars, popular music, modern myth. How fabulous to discover such a responsive poet, excited by her surroundings, who so clearly delights in matching experience and language.

Jen Hadfield is an excellent performer of her poems and refreshingly hard-to-place on the contemporary British poetry map. In spirit, perhaps, she is closest to Edwin Morgan, the senior Scottish poet who has ranged across the whole of such a map with equal parts seriousness and levity. For a poet still in her mid-twenties, she offers not just promise, but a direction for other young writers to follow.

But Wait! There's More:
(a biographical update, care of The Guardian UK)
A relative newcomer to poetry who has been widely praised for her passion and awareness of the natural world has tonight won one of the genre's grandest awards – the TS Eliot prize for poetry.

Four Poems by Hadfield:
Unfledging
In The Same Way
No Snow Fell On Eden
Melodeon On The Road Home

Related Links:
Hadfield's blog, rogueseeds
Hadfield selects her Top Five Musical Moments

Recommended Viewing:Stan Lee & Grant Morrison

To see Grant chat with Deepak Chopra(!), click here.
(Both videos were done by Tone Milazzo.)

Author Du Jour:President Elect Barack Obama

Biography:
(Stolen whole from Wikipedia)
Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and President-elect of the United States of America -- 44th president of USA... :) Obama is the first person of African-American descent to be nominated by a major American political party for President, and the first person of African American descent to be elected President of the United States of America. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.
As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. Obama announced his presidential campaign in February 2007, and was formally nominated at the 2008 Democratic National Convention with Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Obama won the 2008 presidential election and will take the oath of office and become the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.

Bibliography:
(Again, from Wikipedia)
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Barack Obama in His Own Words


Brief clip of Obama talking about books/his favorite book as a child:


Obama's 11/04 Acceptance Speech:

Part two

Author Du Jour: Emma Bull

Biography:
(stolen whole from Wikipedia)
Emma Bull (born 13 December 1954) is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. She has participated in Terri Windling's Borderland shared universe, which is the setting of her 1994 novel Finder. She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2007 Bull released Territory, a radical retelling of the shootout at Tomstone's O.K. Corral involving tough minded widows, battling wizards, and a bungled stagecoach robbery.

Bibliography - Novels
(again, thanks to Wikipedia)
War for the Oaks (1987)
Falcon (1989)
Bone Dance (1991; nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards)
Finder (1994)
The Princess and the Lord of Night (1994)
Freedom and Necessity (1997, with Steven Brust)
Territory (July 2007)

Selected Interviews
w/ Backstage Live
w/ Bookslut
w/ um...herself, at the Magical Musings blog

To read the free e-book of War for the Oaks, click here.

Care to see an author sing? Emma Bull sings western ditties below.

Recommended Viewing:Lynda Barry in San Fransisco

Yes, it's choppy. And yes, it does start and stop at random. But Barry is an engaging and entertaining speaker, and it's a helluva lot better than Two Girls & A Cup.
Parts 2 & 3

Recommended Viewing:Bookslut Interviews Eddie Campbell

Visit the Bookslut website by clicking here.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

The author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again died Friday of an apparent suicide.

TIME magazine obituary
AP obituary
LA Times obituary
LA Times online discussion

Author Du Jour: Kenneth Anger

Biography
(stolen from Wikipedia, but revised to reflect my personal opinions)

Kenneth Anger is an author, magician and filmmaker. He was born in Santa Monica, California as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer and attended the Maurice Kossloff Dancing School with Shirley Temple. He began making films around age nine, but his early films are now lost. He gained fame and notoriety from the publication of the French version of Hollywood Babylon in Paris in 1959, a tell-all book of the scandals of Hollywood's rich and famous. A pirated (and incomplete) version was first published in the U.S. in 1965. The official U.S. version was not published until 1974.

His first film to see distribution was Fireworks, filmed in Los Angeles in 1947, which gained the attention of Jean Cocteau, who then invited him to go to Paris. In 1949, Anger directed The Love That Whirls which according to the 1972 book Experimental Cinema contained (faked) nudity, and was thus confiscated by the film lab. While most of his films are short subject (ranging from 3.5 minutes to 30 minutes) mood pieces, in 1955 he made a documentary film of the ruins of Crowley's Thelema Abbey in Cefalù, Sicily, which is now considered a lost film.

He developed a close friendship with Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research. Anger would later recall that Kinsey was his first customer after Kinsey purchased a copy of Fireworks when they first met in 1947. Anger eventually helped Kinsey build his film archive. The Anger Collection includes correspondence between the two men, as well as letters to and from former Institute director John Bancroft. Anger would later speak openly of his participation in Kinsey's research, including being filmed masturbating.

During the late 1960s he associated with The Rolling Stones, as well as Bobby Beausoleil (before he gained notoriety as an associate of the Charles Manson family). Beausoleil, a musician who had played with Arthur Lee, was cast as Lucifer in Anger's proposed film, Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil and Anger had a falling out and Beausoleil left, taking most of the completed film with him (Beausoleil is also rumored to have buried the film's negative in the desert at one of Manson's former hangouts.) British singer Marianne Faithfull later appeared in Anger's re-shot version of the film. Some footage from the earlier version of Lucifer Rising (including Beausoleil) ended up in Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother.

Kenneth Anger had a widely publicized spat with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page over the Lucifer Rising soundtrack.Anger claimed Page took three years to deliver the music, and the final product was only 25 minutes of droning and was useless. Anger also accused Page of "having an affair with the White Lady" and being too strung out on drugs to complete the project. Page countered claiming he had fulfilled all his obligations, even going so far as to lend Anger his own film editing equipment to help him finish the project. Page's music was dumped eventually and replaced in 1979 by music written and recorded by Bobby Beausoleil - the only movie soundtrack in history recorded inside a prison.

In the mid-1980s, Anger sold a 16mm print of the incomplete Lucifer Rising, containing the Page soundtrack, to Christopher Dietler, who eventually released the soundtrack taken from film on an album titled Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising Jimmy Page Soundtrack. Anger filed a lawsuit and won an injunction against Dietler who turned over the digitally enhanced master and agreed not to press or sell anymore record albums.

Anger's lifelong interest in the occult brought him into contact with a variety of groups and individuals. He was a lifelong friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, both before and after the founding of the Church of Satan in the 1960s, and lived with LaVey and his family during the 1980s. In more recent years Anger accepted initiation into the Ordo Templi Orientis in a semi-honorary fashion. For 20 years from the early eighties, Anger released no new material. In the new millennium he has since returned to filmmaking.

Anger has been threatening to release a third installment of the Hollywood Babylon series, but says that legal threats (most notably from the Church of Scientology) have prevented it. A crappy, un-Anger, Hollywood Babylon 3 was released earlier this year. Avoid it, lest you be cursed.

Bibliography (English Works)
(Again, stolen from the Wikipedia)

Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger (1959)
Hollywood Babylon II Kenneth Anger (1986)
The Devil's Notebook Kenneth Anger and Anton Szandor LaVey (1992)
Satan Speaks! Kenneth Anger and Anton Szandor LaVey (1998)
Suicide in the Entertainment Industry Kenneth Anger and David K. Frasier (2001)

For your viewing pleasure: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Recommended Viewing: Alan Moore On Everything

There's 10 parts, so settle in.
Part 2: the legendary years, 3: on his upcoming novel, Jerusalem 4: V for Vendetta, 5: on Super Heroes, 6, 7, 8: Moore's favorite superhero, 9: The Simpsons, 10: advice for young cartoonists

Tank Girl Artist Jamie Hewlett Profiled in da Guardian UK

The intro:
His is the pen behind Eighties comic-strip heroine Tank Girl, virtual band Gorillaz and the opera Monkey - and soon you'll be seeing his animated title sequence for the Olympics on TV. He tells Mark Kermode how a shy boy turned into a great graphic art rebel...

Click here to read the whole shebang.

Click here for their specially prepared In pictures: Jamie Hewlett designs past and present.

Author Du Jour: Jennifer Haigh

Biography
(Stolen whole from Wikipedia)
Jennifer Wasilko Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her critically acclaimed novel Mrs. Kimble (2003) won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction.
Haigh was born in Barnesboro, PA, and is a 1990 graduate of Dickinson College. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2002. Her short stories have appeared in Good Housekeeping, The Hartford Courant, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives on Boston's South Shore.
Her second book, Baker Towers (2005), was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship award for best book by a New England writer.
Her third novel, The Condition will be published by HarperCollins in July, 2008 traces the dissolution of a proper New England family when their only daughter is diagnosed with Turner's Syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that keeps her from going through puberty.

Interview Links
Chester College School Paper
BookBrowse.com
Eye On Books (audio interview)

Author's Official Website
Click here

Recommended Viewing:Junot Díaz speaks to the rich folks at Google

Recommended Viewing: Cult Pop Interview with Corey Redekop

Michigan public access show Cult Pop interviews Canadian author Corey Redekop about his novel Shelf Monkey, a satire of the world of television Book Clubs, low-wage bookstore employees, madness, and revenge.



Part 2

Author Du Jour: Gilbert Hernandez

Biography:
(swiped without permission from from RAW)

Gilbert (pronounced heel-bear-toe) Hernandez was raised in Oxnard, Southern California with his other four brothers and one sister. His father was a Mexican immigrant, married to a Texan from a family with deep Mexican roots. In her youth, his mother had collected comic books and that passion was passed on to her children. "It was nostalgic for her, I guess. So comics were always normal to us, it was an everyday thing. It wasn't until school that we realized that we were abnormal," commented Gilbert. "I always felt that I was living in two worlds. One was the little Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and even kids in the neighborhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was pretty ethnically mixed."

Raised on a diet of pop culture, comics, science fiction and monster movies, all the family were drawing comics from an early age. However, for Gilbert and Jamie, that childhood passion never left them, even when punk rock gripped their lives in the late 1970's. At the urging of elder brother Mario, Jamie and Gilbert self-published the first issue of Love & Rockets, which was quickly picked up by then fledgling comic publisher, Fantagraphics, in 1982 and continues to this day.

Essential Reading:
(stolen from RAW)

Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories
Imagine a novel by Gabriel Garciá Marquez told in comic form, with the depth and vibrancy to bring a fictional Latin American village and it's people to life. Palomar is the intricate tale of the relationships between the citizens of that town - their lives, loves and deaths. This volume collects all the Palomar stories by Gilbert Hernandez including the essential classics Blood Of Palomar and Poison River.

"Beyond impressive. The cumulative power of the Palomar saga is arguably that of the most substantive single work the comics medium has yet produced."
Booklist

"With Heartbreak Soup I had an agenda of sorts. I'm trying to get non-Latinos, for lack of a better word, to identify with Latinos as human beings. Simple as that. I think I've felt that since I was a kid."
Gilbert Hernandez, The Comics Journal #178

X
A portrayal of 1990's LA society centred on Luba's daughter Maricela, who is now an illegal immigrant in the USA working as street corner flower girl. It is a story that conveys the class and racial tensions that exist in all city streets, dealing with rock bands, skin heads, surfers and jaded yuppies.

"It was my version of a Maggie and Hopey story. I thought, Well, I have the same punk rock n' roll background, and I've never used it in a comic. Then that became dark and twisted, too. Something was going on with me and I don't really know where it came from."
Gilbert Hernandez, Comic Book Artist #15

Luba In America
Luba is the matriarch of the mythical Latin American village of Palomar. But now she has relocated to the USA to be with her extended family as their careers and lives develop in unexpected directions.

Recommended Interviews:

The Daily Crosshatch
The Pulse