Your state in a book

Business Insider has a map of the "most famous" book represented by each of the 50 states. Let me judge them by where I've lived:

• Wisconsin: LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. I was raised on these books and they are perennial classics, so this is fine by me. (But I've never been to Pepin, WI near where the Ingallses lived. Road trip?)
• Rhode Island: Jodi Picoult's MY SISTER'S KEEPER. Wait, it really takes place there? Interesting.
• Massachusetts: WALDEN, although I think one of Cotton Mather's diaries would be more accurate if my sources inside the state are any indicator. 
• Illinois: THE JUNGLE. Seems unfair. 
• New York: THE GREAT GATSBY. Okay, it's almost 90 years old, but we will take it. 
• Pennsylvania: THE LOVELY BONES. Not a flattering look. 

Scanning the list, I think the person who compiled it has a really mordant sense of humor. You'd have to, to list fun travel reads like THE SHINING, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and CARRIE among your titles. Seriously, who wants to visit the grave at the end of CARRIE? Nobody. But Kansas is happy, while Ohio is confused.

Filmbook: "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

I have been anticipating this movie since it was a rumor of an adaptation, the kind of pet project that captures everyone's attention and then is never heard about again except for on Wikipedia. I liked it, and if you wanted to go see it tomorrow I'd probably go with you, but knowing that I'm studying it, I'm not losing myself in it. By that metric "The Great Gatsby" failed for me. Making me interested and even provoked? Right away, and completely.

You know the drill: A doe-eyed Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) moves in next door to a mysterious man who throws legendary parties -- Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who takes a shine to Nick after he finds out about Nick's rich cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) who lives across the bay in the old-money Hamptons. (The Egg Islands. Whatever.) Debauchery ensues, but a calculated amount and deployment of it, leading up to the moment when Gatsby can set eyes on Daisy -- who he wooed lo these five years ago -- and try to woo her again. Luhrmann adds a frame story in which Carraway is writing THE GREAT GATSBY while drying out at a clinic in 1929, at his doctor's urging.

Luhrmann built his reputation on his "Red Curtain Trilogy" of movies strung together by theatrical motifs ("William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" being the one most germane to this audience, transplanting Italy into Southern California but with the Bard's language intact). MTV-style editing, swoopy camera shots, melodrama and anachronism were his tools, most of them notably absent from his last movie, 2008's "Australia." For those of us who loved the Red Curtain Trilogy, "Australia" was a sweeping, very pretty disappointment; it's hardly even worth describing its puffed-up plot because the vistas were more memorable anyway. More Merchant and Ivory than MTV, and that's the direction into which "The Great Gatsby" occasionally meandered, as if Luhrmann, now older, has grown more cautious. 

But caution is the last thing this movie about careless people, and those whose care prompts them to do lavish, wasteful things, requires to do its job. The director has never been subtle -- imagine those words "not subtle" in neon with crawling animated dots around them flanked by trumpeters to get what I mean -- and often it works against him. But the splashiness of his going there distinguish this movie from a more muted adaptation, like the Redford one I personally describe as "about nine hours long," or the lost 2000 TV film. (Look it up. Paul Rudd is Nick Carraway.) Chafe at the auteur theory or not, but not any director could have made this particular film; it's gotta be a Luhrmann. (There's actually a sequence in a flashback that directly calls back to "Romeo + Juliet" evoking a similar emotion, but I assume that was just put in for nerds like me.)

I loved this movie when it was gutsy and strange and had too much going on in the frame; I liked it less when it resorted to tricks like printing Carraway's narration on the sky as if it had drifted there straight from his typewriter, or repeating earlier lines in voiceover for Foreshadowing (capital letter implied). I loved the big, showy performances from DiCaprio, who actually looks to be having fun onscreen for the first time since "Titanic," Joel Edgerton as an almost-not-monstrous Tom Buchanan, and Elizabeth "Face Made For Flapper Era" Debicki as Jordan Baker; I also loved Mulligan's Daisy, who has to be so subtle so you don't either love or hate her. (I liked Maguire all right, but a lot less in the second half, when his attempt to put on an appreciative/ admiring face in Gatsby's presence left him looking like a cartoon hound.) I loved the mash-ups, and the way the movie's main pop theme is later worked over into an instrumental for the band at Gatsby's house. I didn't like the frame story, because so many other movies have been there (I was thinking of the BENJAMIN BUTTON film in particular, which offers a similar unresolved taste).

For my taste this movie would have to be a little bolder in its choices for me to love it, but several of its arresting set pieces stay with me even now. And everyone I went to see it with, loved or hated, expressed the desire to revisit Fitzgerald's classic.

Filmbook verdict: Of course I'm not going to let you get away with seeing this before you read the book, but if you read it and then see it, let's chat. 

Filmbook-to-be: "Great Gatsby" fan art makes life worth living again

Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby 3-D" arrives in theatres in a hair over two weeks and the film's official Tumblr blog (of course there is one) has been running a fan art contest. I regret to credit the person who made this, only because I was at a very low point of existence when I came across it, and I immediately laughed until I wept and then emailed it to 80 people. I believe this is based on the 1968 Dick Van Dyke vehicle (ZING) "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but it's hard to be sure!

I will do my penance by attending a midnight screening of "The Great Gatsby" and then telling you all its secrets.

Filmbook: GREAT GATSBY movie tie-in cover revealed

I hate myself for loving you.

This week in Fitzgerald

In honor of the end of "30 Rock" (I don't want to discuss it), the Princeton Alumni Weekly created a yearbook page for Alec Baldwin's character Jack Donaghy, one of its famous fictional alumni.

He deserved the "Amory Blaine Handsomeness Scholarship" too.

Warner Brothers has moved "The Great Gatsby" to summer 2013, for who cares what reason this is terrible.

Filmbook-to-be: Trailer for "The Great Gatsby" (2012)

Carey Mulligan, what are you doing? Okay, anyway -- as a heritage Baz loyalist who didn't feel anything from walking out of "Australia," I still want to see it. And DiCaprio's Gatsby, while I wasn't looking forward to it initially, will probably have some interesting wrinkles in it. We knew this wasn't going to be a chamber picture; it'll either be spectacular and great, or spectacular and completely unmoving. For me, I think it's too early to call which, although the Internet has already done that for you if you like. For people griping about how the trailer contains anachronistic Kanye, you are missing the entire point and are recommended to go back and watch "Romeo and Juliet" (my favorite Luhrmann, for the record).

We are all Gatsbys, we are all Carraways

Last week I went to see "Gatz," the adaptation of THE GREAT GATSBY currently up at the Public Theater. I've been turning it over and over in my head ever since.

Elevator Repair Service, the company that created and acts in "Gatz," also produced the Hemingway adaptation I saw and loved last fall. If you're new around here I have wanted to see this production since it was prevented from performing in New York entirely (due to rights issues with the Fitzgerald estate) and traveled to places like Philadelphia and Cambridge that, for whatever reason, I couldn't make. I bitterly regretted not going the first time it played the Public in 2010. This year I decided I would be stopped neither by the ticket price nor the prospect of burning half a personal day to go. (They specialize in full-text adaptations, so the presentation including intermissions and dinner break clocked in about 8 hours. Curtain up at 3PM, walking to the subway past the closed coffee shops of Nolita at 11:10PM.)

It's been several years since I re-read THE GREAT GATSBY, but if I were to start it again tomorrow I would still not have the experience I had of this play, of the massive volume of text (49,500 words, according to a Playbill piece about Scott Shepherd who plays Nick Carraway and is responsible for most of it) all coming at me, all at once. It drew certain aspects out, like the number of overt references to people's eyes even ahead of the Eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleberg, or Fitzgerald's multiple uses of the verb "corrugate" to describe what rain does to a body of water. Immersion will do that.

Having a scene depicted onstage can also bring into focus things a novel may not specify, because the process of fleshing them out onstage prompts certain decisions. Case in point: the proximity of characters to each other in parties or crowded scenes (like Myrtle's apartment), where the reactions -- or lack thereof -- of other people contribute to the overall picture of the action taking place. Likewise, when Nick Carraway leaves that party with one of the men, there's an edge to his absenting himself, and a suggestion that they are doing more than simply getting away from the noise.

Carraway is the watcher, positioning himself very consciously as the observer at the heart of THE GREAT GATSBY. It is this position, of privilege we could say, that allows him to do exactly what he criticizes Tom and Daisy for doing in the end -- leaving the East and the tangle of relations that he has developed while he lived on West Egg. No one walks away blameless. "Gatz" takes the position that this is a lie, because even when he's apart from the action, he's still there. Nowhere is this clearer than after Gatsby's death when, as Carraway, Shepherd is center stage with the body of his friend on the couch behind him. Most of Shepherd's final presentation is given off-book, so it feels like he's just talking to us -- us, because he doesn't have anyone else, except he does because in this adaptation, we are being his Carraway. We are witnesses to the end. To what extent, then, is his loneliness still (always) a state of mind? How much of his distancing between himself and the East Egg crowd he runs with a matter of choice?

Not surprisingly, the other standout actor besides Shepherd was Jim Fletcher as Gatsby. Both he and Shepherd are older than their fictional counterparts are recorded as being, which lends a wistfulness to their activities, the sense that this really is their last grasp at something that has previously alluded them. Fletcher has less to do but, thanks to a bit of staging trickery, appears onstage long before we are introduced to him, and seems to linger around every corner until then. The play clears its throat when he begins to speak. (The actor is also quite tall, adding an element of physical comedy to his desperation in waiting for Daisy or patrolling the fringes of his own party. Eat your heart out, Redford.)

Disappearing into a dark theater for eight hours to re-experience a familiar book is probably not most people's idea of a good time, and "Gatz" took at least through the first intermission to win me over. (I have never thought about the pacing of the novel so intently.) For me it was transformative, like I knew it would be; I accepted what it was telling me, though I would like to think I worked for it. I guess that's why I waited so long.

Work that pays the bills (or: Why do successful authors go to Hollywood?)

Buried in this examination of Michael Chabon's film work (including the forthcoming "John Carter" remake, for which he wrote the script) is an interesting contention about why, despite frustrations and failures, Chabon would have taken something like the pulpy-scifi-looking "John Carter":

It’s likely that Chabon received a hefty paycheck for most of these projects—in addition to having sold the film options for many of his books—and screenwriters can spend years before breaking through with a big movie. Perhaps in no other industry can you toil for so long, be stymied so regularly, and still earn millions, while also being considered a relative success. (Chabon has also mentioned that his screenwriting work has helped to provide health-insurance coverage for his family, which includes four children and his wife Ayelet Waldman, herself a successful novelist.)

What looks like a partial indictment or at least a you're-on-notice for the author who first became known as a novelist, and whose next novel TELEGRAPH AVENUE will be out this fall, resolves into kind of a brash truth. Screenwriters get paid for work that sells but is never made, but if your novel never goes into print, you're not going to get your full advance (and depending on your contract, may have to return all of it). And in the meantime, you're living on your day-job earnings, or your royalties from the last book, or dreams and wishes and unicorn rides, or whatnot.

Jacob Silverman's piece is hardly the first to point out that full-time writing is not a lucrative occupation, and I don't carry his concern that those projects will negatively affect his writing. But it's startling to see as successful an author as Chabon pointing out that, in this case, it actually saves him money to step away from his fiction. Here are a few interviews in which Chabon mentions the health-insurance angle, and without getting too deeply into that flawed American system, well, it's not as if he can draw on COBRA from his previous office job since that was probably 15 years ago. (And if you've never been on COBRA, what gets you is not the high cost to begin with -- it's the irregular, steep price increases designed to make you quit.)

It's easy to make light of (as I have) authors who verge into more lucrative media, who sign HBO deals that may never see the light of day or become the fifth writers on flawed screenplays (like Chabon and "Spider-Man 2"). Maybe they're irresponsible with money and possessed of delusions of grandeur, like latter-day F. Scott Fitzgeralds! (Sorry, Francis.) Or maybe they're just trying to get by, and if a two-author household like the Chabon-Waldman complex finds the most thrifty solution is to take side work -- that is still about creating things, mind -- then maybe the more relevant question is "How did we get to the point where we can't afford to keep our literary writers in business?"

Caption this photo

CAREY MULLIGAN AS DAISY: You guys I am so excited to be in this movie!!! You guys!!!
LEONARDO DICAPRIO AS GATSBY: Look at how mysterious I am. That has "Oscar bait" written all over it.
CAREY MULLIGAN AS DAISY: Leo! I used to have posters of you on my wall, Leo! Okay, I can totally focus for this shot!
LEONARDO DICAPRIO AS GATSBY: Maybe I won't even need this 3-D piece of ridiculousness if J. Edgar takes off. Never mind, practicing my Oscarface anyway.
CAREY MULLIGAN AS DAISY: My hair is so pretty!
LEONARDO DICAPRIO AS GATSBY: She came so well-regarded. I don't know what's going on here. Was Gwyneth not available?
CAREY MULLIGAN AS DAISY: I have read this book like 500 times you guys! But I never thought I was going to play Daisy! I mean, Daisy, right! In your face Knightley, in your face!
TOBEY MAGUIRE AS NICK CARRAWAY: Derp derp derpy derp! Derp.

Source. And before you start, I'm sure Carey Mulligan is plenty smart and Leonardo DiCaprio has done a lot of movies that did not directly lead to Oscarville. And I still like Baz Luhrmann even though it is definitely not cool to do so right now.

Top 5 Books I Want To Reread Right Now

(but all I have time to do is write a blog post about them)

• Betty Smith, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (since last year, apparently?)
• Ernest Hemingway, THE SUN ALSO RISES (see: Tuesday)
• John Feinstein, HARD COURTS (since I went to the U.S. Open)
• Jonathan Franzen, THE CORRECTIONS (since: I read FREEDOM, probably)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY (perennial)

Filmbook-to-Be: Cast So Far For Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" (2012?)

• Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby 
• Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway
• Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan
• Joel Edgerton (Australian, nothing looks familiar in his bio) as Tom Buchanan 
• Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson 

This post is mostly for Blogmigo Wade Garrett if he's out there because we were discussing it and couldn't come up with who had been cast as the Nick Carraway. What, Paul Rudd wasn't available? That is a shame.

What I Learned About Famous Authors From Watching "Midnight In Paris" (dir. Woody Allen, 2011)

(Spoilers.)

• It's okay to call T.S. Eliot "Tom" if that's how he introduces himself.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald is a nice dude but his hair is questionable. And his wife is 12, if not in real age than in behavior and stature.
• Alice B. Toklas doesn't talk and is practically invisible.
• Ernest Hemingway would not be that much fun to hang out with, in part because he has to work his man-credentials into every conversation. Also, he hates you. He'll still get a drink with you, but he hates you.
• That Djuna Barnes, man, she can dance.
• It's fun to hang out, but in the end Gertrude Stein is the only one who will actively help you get your shit together.

"That's pretty old"

I'm going to be quoting this nine-strip version of THE GREAT GATSBY for the rest of the year, so it would probably behoove you to take a look at it. (From Kate Beaton, who brought us Dude Watchin' With The Brontës.)

Fitzgerald, at last

"Gatz," the 6-hour adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" I wrote about last year as a gift for the book lover you love, will open the Public Theater's 2010-2011 season next fall. First calendar item for September 2010!

I'm over at Wrapped Up in Books this week for book club (or will be in a few hours) so come by and talk about THE WRESTLER'S CRUEL STUDY.

Holiday Gift Guide 2009: The Neiman Marcus Options

In honor of the annual celebration of decadence and (this year) host to the $200k "Algonquin round table experience."

The Complete Penguin Classics: "Only" $8,047 on Amazon (plus applicable storage charges) for 1,082 books encompassing the greatest works of Western literature. Fun fact: According to Amazon, the bestselling volume out of the bunch is John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH, which I happen to own in Penguin edition.

Cormac McCarthy's typewriter: Of course, that depends on whether the anonymous buyer who just picked it up for $254,000 at Christie's is willing to sell. On the other hand, he wrote THE ROAD and BLOOD MERIDIAN on it. P.S. It doesn't work.

Tiffany & Co. silver bookmark: So much classier than my usual "envelope the ConEd bill came in" accessory.

Anthropologie's A Rather Novel Collection fragrances: They smell like tea, not books, but this inaugural collection ($48 for each of 6 scents) comes in book-shaped packaging. In other words, they'll look great on your existing shelves.

Tickets to "Gatz" at the American Rep in Cambridge, Mass.: Gather 'round, your weirdo aunt is going to tell you a theatre story. Once upon a time, a Brooklyn-based theatre company wrote a 6-hour play in which THE GREAT GATSBY is read verbatim in a modern office setting. And there was much rejoicing, because it was supposed to be awesome. Then the Fitzgerald estate stepped in and said they couldn't do it in New York, because they'd given the rights to someone else, and the little would-be theatre critic went home and felt pretty fucking angry actually, which passion surprised her a little but that is Art, friends. Anyway, that company, Elevator Repair Service, went on to do that play (called "Gatz") in Philadelphia in 2007 to raves all around, and now they are doing it in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theatre Jan. 7-Feb. 7. You can buy tickets in two parts or see both sections of the play on one weekend day (that's what the little would-be theatre critic would do).

You always look so cool.

So this happened in my inbox:


The e-mail (from the J. Peterman Company, WHERE ELSE) was also titled "Gatsby would be furious," but really, shouldn't it be "Carraway would be furious"? The man himself would probably nod solemnly and admire the business acumen of such a move.

"All that matters is that you have one, just one," goes the copy. "A piece of how things were." That's great, but on the wrong man (really, most men) this shirt would not look cool at all, but rather stuffy and a bit Puritan, like a stray historical re-enactor who just sat on a freshly painted picnic bench. Still, I'll make sure to order that a cupboard full of these shirts is conspicuously displayed on the set of my rap video.

Filmbook-to-Be: Borne back ceaselessly into the past

Via one of my Facebook friends (language, two small photos potentially NSFW): Storyboards for Michael Bay's "The Great Gatsby," starring Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis from "Armageddon" as Nick and Gatsby, Megan Fox (what's the correct punctuation for a massive eye-roll?) as Daisy and a wolf as Meyer Wolfsheim.

This document is thankfully a joke, but Australian director Baz Luhrmann announced last year he would be adapting Fitzgerald's book yet again for the big screen. (Apparently this is also a plot line on "Entourage" with Martin Scorsese the fictional director; judging by his adaptation of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, he would be faithful to the book without really capturing its essence. I gave up on "Entourage" ages ago, but if it were true you know Leonardo DiCaprio would be playing Gatsby... yikes.) Luhrmann is a love-it-or-hate-it director, so you already know where you'll fall on his take; you can probably figure out where I stand given that I didn't just call the news "the end of the world as we know it." (Really, Sarvas? ...Really?)

Luhrmann's as well-equipped as anyone to handle it. All three adaptations of "The Great Gatsby" now available on DVD are, to say the least, frustrating. It's been years since I saw the Redford-Farrow-Waterston adaptation, but I remember it being very slow and Mia Farrow being annoying. The 2000 TV version is weighed down with a confusing performance by unknown-to-yours-truly Brit Toby Stephens, although the casting of Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway is a stroke of genius. And then we have "G," the "urban" version set in the P. Diddy White Party Hamptons -- yes, I Netflixed that on purpose, and I tell you it is not worth your time. (A silent version has been completely lost, and no one cares enough about a 1949 Alan Ladd version to get it on DVD.)

GATSBY seems to break the unwritten Hollywood rule that books get just one shot at the big screen. Bookforum wonders why so many Fitzgerald adaptations aren't very well-regarded, and points out rightly that "the problem might have to do less with the chemistry of movie stars and more with a film culture that insists on seeing [his] stories as swooning romances in the first place." (If anything, last year's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" could have used more romance, or at least more emotion.) According to the Bookforum article, Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart actually wrote to Luhrmann begging him not to make this latest version, but he might just be protecting his legacy from working on the Redford version. But none of the adaptations before can touch the book and there's no reason to believe this one will.

Filmbook: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This post contains spoilers for the 2008 film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but NOT the F. Scott Fitzgerald story of the same name. I will carefully sidestep what makes Mr. Button different and encourage you to go read the story yourself.

I first encountered "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's collection TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE. That title is a misnomer -- while most of the stories collected are about the jazz babies and the bathtub gin, the collection also contains a number of what can only be called fairy tales. "Button" the story may refer to real-life places and years, but the world in which it operates is altogether separate from our own. It's a bewitching little tale and one that stuck with me the most after I finished the book, for its poignancy and the way it addressed themes without making them Themes.

Overall, "Button" is beautiful but cold. It actually reminded me of another movie I saw and liked in 2008, "Synecdoche, New York," in that they both deal with similar questions of mortality and aging and death. The difference between them is that "Button" strikes each note perfectly, but feels exact and mechanical in the way it unfolds; "Synecdoche" is a glorious mess with a whole lot of jumble, but which moved me deeply and whose symbolism I am still puzzling over. I wonder what might have happened if Charlie Kaufman, the madman/director of "Synecdoche," had gotten into "Button." Certainly, the ending of the latter echoes the ending of the former (in the way I reacted to it, anyway) but if I'm going to revisit one of them, I'm going for "Synecdoche."

That said, the film is a marvel to look at. I remember seeing "Zodiac" a year and a half ago, squinting at the screen because the projection was muddying up David Fincher's glorious shots of San Francisco by night. Here he dips into a yellow-and-brown palette to spin this fairy tale, and it is gorgeous -- reminds me of a silent film I watched in college called "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans," another long-playing love story, but with an incredible texture thanks to the digital video. This film is a lock for the art direction Oscar -- some of its images are, literally, breathtaking. And no one in this world is more gorgeous than Cate Blanchett, who plays an important figure in Button's life. Tilda Swinton is also in the movie in a smaller role, but she fades next to Blanchett's character Daisy, whose voice sounds off kilter in the first few screens but who does more acting with her eyes than Brad Pitt as Button can do with his entire arsenal of charm. Of course, Pitt is hampered by an often distracting special effect, but I'm shocked Blanchett isn't getting more praise for her role in this. Granted, Fincher builds her up in every shot to be the glory she comes to represent for Benjamin and for the audience, but wow, what a star.

That said, Blanchett's through-line is connected to what I saw as the film's major problem in adaptation: Changing the city where "Button" takes place and nudging the time frame forward (to encompass more of Fitzgerald's own time, for one) were both acceptable to me, as well as the rendering of Button in a slightly different manner. But for whatever reason, screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord chose to wrap this fantasia in a TV-level frame story that is just so lame. (And I must say, people are blaming Roth for this change because he wrote the "Forrest Gump" screenplay, but there's only one moment in the film I found Gumpian.) It's boringly shot, distracting from the central narrative and ultimately pointless. I understand the parallels it might set up, but no one who sees this movie needs its Themes to be spelled out in the way this frame story does. Not to mention, it adds nearly half an hour to the 168-minute picture. Leave the final scene if you have to in its clock-stopping brevity, and take the rest out.

Filmbook verdict: It's Oscar season and this is going to get nominated all over the place. So read the story, then see the film, then come back and debate me on it. If you like homework, get yourself to "Synecdoche, New York" and rent "Zodiac" (and for extra credit, "Sunrise") before going to the theatre. (Winter break's over! Get back to work!)

(For what it's worth, the four family members I dragged to see "Button" disliked the movie to varying degrees and all blamed me for boring them to death on Christmas.)