Southern Bookman

David Milch's "Life's Work" tells redemptive story of self-destruction, Hollywood fame

Only David Milch could have transformed St. Paul and the cross into Deadwood and the South Dakota gold rush.

Milch, famed TV producer and writer, details that shift in his entertaining, self-absorbed memoir "Life's Work."

Although Milch finished the book with the aid of his daughters while battling the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease, "Life's Work" gives a full account of his troubled childhood, heroin and gambling addiction, Yale education and  unlikely TV success.

The change from Christianity and the Roman Empire to gold and the American West is not that surprising coming from a writer who taught a course at Yale titled "Strategies of Indirection in Fiction."

Noted poet and critic William Logan in an article in the current New Criterion recalls taking the course, presenting a vivid portrait of Milch, an inveterate gambler on football games and horse racing and a superb writing teacher.

Milch in his memoir looks back on his career as a rebellious Yale undergraduate. Although seriously addicted to heroin and alcohol, and frequently in trouble with local law enforcement, Milch enjoyed a warm relationship with Yale professor, novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren.

Warren, as Milch fondly remembers, gave special attention to Milch's work, praising his novel in progress as containing the best dialogue that one of his students had ever written. Warren treated Milch as a wayward son, inviting him to visit his home and giving him career advice.

Milch also built a close relationship with the famed Yale critic R.W. B. Lewis, assisting him with his research on Lewis' Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Edith Wharton. All the while, Milch was searching for drugs and betting on horses and sports, while struggling to finish the novel praised by Warren.

The book looks back on Milch's abusive, reckless father, a surgeon also addicted to gambling who treated gangsters to pay off debts. Milch also was sexually abused as a young boy by a camp counselor. He used his chilhood traumas as material for his TV shows.

After Yale, Milch received a chance opportunity to write for Steven Bochco's ground-breaking NBC police drama "Hill Street Blues." Milch and Bochco then collaborated on the controversial crime saga "NYPD Blue," a smash for the network while drawing fire from conservatives because of its violence and explicit sexuality. A few flashes of nudity shook the foundations of network TV.

TV's gain was literature's loss; Milch never finished his novel. Yet characters like Dennis Franz's alcoholic detective Andy Sipowich in "NYPD Blue"  laid the foundation for HBO "quality TV" productions  like "The Wire" and "The Sopranos."

With a wife and family, Milch entered rehab, leading to his fascination with St. Paul's conversion to Christianity, his evangelistic career and New Testament writings, and his martyrdom in Rome.

Milch pitched HBO a show based on Paul's establishing the church throughout the Roman empire, but the cable network already had a show on ancient Rome in the works.

Seeing gold as analogous to St. Paul's world-changing symbol of Jesus' cross, Milch instead sold HBO on  the series"Deadwood," which explored  the rough life in the South Dakota boom town where the precious metal was discovered in the 1870s. It was famous as the place where "Wild Bill" Hickock was murdered, the subject of a powerful "Deadwood" episode.

"Deadwood," known for its vulgar dialogue, shocking violence and striking characters, was one of HBO's most memorable shows although it only lasted three years. Despite battling Alzheimer's, Milch completed the show with a movie-length conclusion.

"Life's Work" while often disjointed and egocentric tells a compelling story of redemption. After all of his destructive behavior, Milch achieves grace.

 

Academy Awards nominees unappealing

I'll watch the Academy Awards Sunday night, although I like many others have lost my love for the movies.

Unlike in years past, I haven't seen most of the films nominated for Best Picture.

I liked Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis," and will root for Austin Butler to win best actor for his portrayal of the singer. But the movie went on too long, pushing too far into melodrama.

The only other Oscar-nominated film I saw, Steven Spielberg's "The Fabelmans," was entertaining, but hardly rose to the heights of  "The Deer Hunter," "The Godfather"  or "Casablanca."  Yet many Oscar winners of the past now appear unworthy.

Like many film fans, I rarely if ever to to the theater anymore. I watched "Elvis" and "The Fabelmans" at home, on my TV screen.

That's where I could now watch "Tar" and "All Quiet on the Western Front." But neither is appealing.

I'm sure Cate Blanchett gives a wonderful performance in "Tar" as the impervious conductor who suffers a downfall, but the character sounds too monstrous for me to spend several hours with.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" looks worthwhile, yet I recoil at all of that trench warfare.

Nor am I drawn to the Oscar favorite, "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once."  I just don't think I would get it.

I used to love watching all of the Best Picture nominees before the big show. Now, the movies have passed me by.

 

 

 

Vanity Fair shows old excellence with 29th Hollywood issue

Vanity Fair's excellent Hollywood issue proclaims that film glamour lives on in a new generation.

The 29th annual celebration of the movies sizzles with the magazine's old flair, a triumph for Editor Radhika Jones, beset by seismic cultural shifts and falling circulation, news-stand sales and advertising since she took charge in late 2017.

Jones' compelling mix of Hollywood features and in-depth journalism recalls the great issues of  predecessors Graydon Carter and Tina Brown.

Disputing a prevailing belief that the film star is dead, a photographic gallery of Hollywood's rising generation glows with film magic.

Photographer Steven Klein and stylist Patti Wilson capture the charisma of Selena Gomez, Jonathan Majors, Austin Butler, Ana De Armas, Florence Pugh, Keke Palmer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Julia Garner and Rege-Jean Page.

Hollywood's glorious past is honored with Mark Seal's history of the 100-year-old Hollywood sign and Wayne Lawson's reminisces of co-writing Gloria Swanson's autobiography.

Magazine staff writer Joe Pompeo examines a new media update of the film gossip publications of the past with a feature on Ankler, a movie industry news site.

Writer Richard Rushfield, a fedora-wearing throwback to newspaper entertainment columnists of the past, started the popular news source, and now seeks to expand it on Substack in partnership with media entrepreneur Janice Min.

Washington politics receives attention with Abigail Tracy's profile of Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z congressman.

Writer James Pogue in a disturbing article investigates the "New Right's" desire to withdraw from American society and live in isolated communities, hoping to survive the collapse of civilization they foresee.

Pogue gives a soberting portrait of wealthy American "preppers" who have colonized rural areas of Montana, driving up property values and forcing longtime residents to  flee. The revealing article is one of the most important the magazine has published in several years.

Like Hollywood, Vanity Fair shines on.

Tom Hanks' sparkling story "Lingua Franca" raises excitement for his first novel

Tom Hanks really can write a good story.

I was skeptical about the 66-year-old actor's writing ability, even though he published a best-selling short story collection, "Uncommon Type," several years ago.

But Hanks' story "Lingua Franca" in the current Harper's magazine restored my long-lost enjoyment of the genre. With its crisp dialogue, fast-paced plot and engaging characters, the story appropriately takes place in the 1940s, the gold era of popular short stories in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.

Reminiscent of traditional masculine-flavored stories by Ernest Hemingway, Tom McGuane and Raymond Carver, "Lingua Franca" turns upon the difficulties of World War II veterans in returning to normal life back home in America.

Rich in the slang of the era, the story builds to a mesmerizing dramatic climax in which two former Marines share a moment of awkward sympathy and healing in a deftly imagined roadhouse in the American West.

The story is an excerpt of Hanks' first novel, "The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece," to be published in May by Knoph.

Drawing upon Hanks' acting career, the book will range across several decades, registering the changes in American society from World War II to the present, according to a plot summary.

In the book, a veteran's experiences inspire a comic book written by his nephew, in which the former soldier appears as a character. Later, a movie is made from the comic, with a series of plot complications.

Hanks' story has me looking forward to reading "The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece," an anticipation for a spring book I haven't felt in years.

 

 

Harper's columnist Rachel Kushner finds movie arrogance outside her front door

Rachel Kushner, who first gained fame as a novelist, is one of America's best essayists.

Kushner has given Harper's magazine's esteemed Easy Chair column a fresh jolt of urbane commentary.

In the tradition of lauded Easy Chair columnist Bernard DeVoto in the mid-20th century, Kushner writes with grace and precise observation. While participating in the action, she displays an amused detachment and satiric sympathy for human failings.

Kushner in her column in the magazine's current issue gives a slice of life look at Los Angeles, where she lives in a historic neighborhood east of Echo Park Lake.

With its renovated 19th century homes and view of downtown Los Angeles, the neighborhood is a favorite of film-makers seeking to show the city's past. Kushner says Jack Nicholson portraying the sardonic detective Jake Geddes in the 1930s-era film "Chinatown" parked his roadster in front of her neighbor's house.

Producers of the "Fast and Furious" series also film in the neighborhood, causing major disruptions. Kushner gives a vivid account of how the "Fast and Furious" crews invade the streets of her community like a conquering army.

Kushner points out that most people in Los Angeles work outside of the film industry. Yet, the business overshadows life in the sprawling metropolis.

The column indicts the film industry's arrogance, while recognizing its seductive glamour and entertainment power.

While supporting a neighborhood protest against the "Fast and Furious" production, she gave the filmmakers permission to shoot scenes of downtown L.A. from her back yard.

She's an observer and part of the story. As with the late Joan Didion, that brings a camera-like objectivity.

Star power burns bright in Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner's memoir "Like a Rolling Stone"

Rolling Stone magazine founder and influential editor Jann S. Wenner's memoir exudes Baby Boomer aspirations, arrogance and delusions.

"Like a Rolling Stone" gives a blow-by-blow account of Wenner's career in the rock and roll fast lane, from the founding of Rolling Stone on a shoestring in 1967 to his giving up control of his Internet-challenged media empire after Donald Trump's election shocked Wenner's cohort of celebrity progressives.

Like images flashing past in a video game, Wenner beams out a dizzying array of famous names, dinner parties, cruises, ski trips. concerts, power lunches and drug-drenched bacchanalias.

While Wenner gives an impressive roll call of of Rolling Stone's scoops and journalistic innovations, his hedonism, egoism and thirsting for celebrity validation exhibit the worst excesses of his generation.

He breathlessly chronicles what he characterizes as close friendships with superstars John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend, closely linking his magazine to promoting their careers. He also boasts of friendships with recording industry executives, a bit close for a music journalist.

Never resting from the social swirl, he also recalls close relationships with Jackie Onassis, John F. Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Tom Wolfe, Bette Midler and Michael Douglas.

The rapid-fire collision of names, gossip and events makes for an exciting narrative, much more captivating than Joe Hagan's lackluster biography "Sticky Fingers."

As the magazine rises in power and influence, and he launches new magazines like "Us Weekly," Wenner veers further and further away from the modest communal values of co-founder Ralph J. Gleason.

Rolling Stone star writer Hunter S. Thompson's rise and sad decline is the book's tragic centerpiece. Fans of Rolling Stone's classic days will again thrill to Thompson's emergence in the magazine with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and his coverage of presidential campaigns. Wenner poignantly expresses the despair and heartbreak of Thompson's mental and physical downfall, culminating in his suicide.

Wenner nearly met a similar fate. He recounts his recovery from a terrifying health crisis that almost caused his death. But he came back to write his memoirs.

On his last issue of Rolling Stone, he placed young environmental activist Greta Thunberg on the cover.

At 75, he's forever young.

 

Stephen Sondheim interviews give engaging portrait of theatrical giant

New Yorker writer D.T. Max conducted a series of interviews with Stephen Sondheim for a magazine profile that never appeared, except for a couple of Talk of the Town pieces.

Intially receptive to the extensive New Yorker piece, Sondheim eventually turned against its publication, fearing it would expose too much of his private life.

But Sondheim fans can glimpse the late composer's generally warm yet prickly personality in Max's "Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim," a compilation of interview transcripts, along with Max's commentaries.

Recorded at Sondheim's townhome at New York City's Turtle Bay and his home in Connecticut, where the musical theater giant died at age 91 in late 2021, the casual interviews reveal a generous, urbane man who fiercely defends his artistic standards.

Sondheim as if talking to the reader gives engaging recollections of his career as a major figure in musical theater, recalling producers, librettists, actors and the production of shows such as "Sweeney Todd," "Company," "Follies," and "Sunday in the Park With George."

Along with theater lore and gossip, Sondheim discusses his composing techniques, fascinating even for those with little understanding of musical theory. Those in a variety of creative fields can benefit from his artistic practices.

In the most entertaining chapter, Max presents a journalistic account of accompanying Sondheim to a PEN writers organization event where Sondheim received an award, presented by Meryl Streep. In the piece, Streep and Sondheim talk about their long friendship, which began when Streep was a drama student at Yale.

Opening a curtain on the sophisticated social life of theatrical artists, Streep and Sonheim look back on enchanted evenings playing charades and other parlor games, some invented by Sondheim. The interviews disclose that Sondheim delighted in puzzles, and once wrote crossword puzzles for New York magazine.

He also loved old movies, classical show tunes, literature and Broadway plays. He was devoted to working each day. At the time of the interviews, he was working on several projects.

While Sondheim comes across as mainly genial and open, he bristles a few times when defending his rigorous standards, such as always using exact rhymes instead of slant rhymes. He even castigated celebrated lyricists like Lorenz Hart for their inexact constructions. In one interview, Sondheim criticizes Cole Porter for what he considers an egregious line in "The Taming of the Shrew."

Sondheim didn't even like his own lyrics written for Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story," believing they were too artificially theatrical.

Max's conversations with Sondheim reveal a man who sought the best in his daily life and his illustrious work. Sondheim's music was his gift to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discovering Woody Allen's "Interiors"

Fruitlessly searching through streaming land for the Robert Gottlieb-Robert Caro documentary "Turn Every Page," I instead clicked upon "Interiors," Woody Allen's first "serious" drama.

Allen wrote and directed the moody 1978 film, not appearing in the production as he had in his previous comedies. The movie mixes Ingmar Bergman-flavored angst and New York intellectual despair. Not a lot of laughs, except for the unconscious self-mockery of the self-indulgent characters.

The film like Allen's later "Hannah and Her Sisters" explores the wounded love of sisters. Allen's wonderful cast mirrors the generational family dynamics: Maureen Stapleton, Geraldine Page and E.G. Marshall from the old guard and the then new generation of Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Griffith, Richard Jordan and Sam Waterston.

Stapleton's appearance late in the movie as the raucous, earthy Pearl brings a welcome shot of energy to the film after long stretches of pretentious New York intellectual dialogue.

Marshall as the patriarch of the family, a successful New York attorney ready for an adventurous retirement, and Page as his mentally fragile ex-wife, an interior designer, give a masterful performance. Keaton, Hurt, Griffith, Jordan and Waterston rise to match their classical acting. .

Keaton, Allen's paramour and muse, stands out as the reflective Renata, perhaps named in homage to the New Yorker film critic Renata Adler. Her implausible success as a poet contrast with the career disappointments of her sister, Joey, played by Hurt, who resembles another winsome star of the time, Carrie Snodgress. Their conflicted relationship is the film's main dramatic fulcrum.

Waterston's performance as a long-haired counterculture radical amusingly displays the same mannerisms and vocal inflections exhibited in in his long-running role as the district attorney Jack McCoy in "Law and Order." Now 82, Waterston is again playing McCoy in a revived "Law and Order."

After unveiling the film's human relationships with dialogue and restricted settings, Allen impressively shifts to film's visual power with images of the sea, a homage to Bergman. Allen's imagery - a vase, flowers, the beach - complements his theatrical language.

The film ends with Keaton and her sisters looking out the window of their childhood home to a calm sea. They are at last ready to move on with their lives.

Allen was more European than other Hollywood directors. "Interiors" opens a different path for American cinema, sadly rarely followed.

 

 

 

 

Influential black playwright Adrienne Kennedy makes Broadway debut

I discovered a major American playwright over the weekend: Adrienne Kennedy.

Kennedy makes her Broadway debut this month at age 91 with a production of her one-act play "The Ohio State Murders" at the renovated James Earl Jones Theater, according to writer Scott Brown's engrossing profile of Kennedy in Sunday's New York Times Style magazine.

Starring Broadway icon Audra McDonald and directed by the acclaimed director Kenny Leon, the play is based Kennedy's experience at Ohio State University, which she entered in 1949 and where she suffered intense racial prejudice as one of the few black students at the school.

In the play, written in 1994 and staged several times, a famed writer named Suzanne Alexander returns to her alma mater and discovers painful truths about the racism she encountered there.

Kennedy, who wrote the Obie-winning "Funnyhouse for a Negro" and a number of other plays, writes in a surrealistic, impressionistic style, Brown said. The television writer and former New York magazine drama critic was one of Kennedy's students.

Her work has influenced Suzan-Lori Parks, Charles Fuller and other black playwrights who've received national acclaim  in recent years.

"The Ohio State Murders" is part of a Broadway black renaissance, including an all-black performance of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" starring Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman, and revivals of August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson," Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" and Parks' "Topdog/Underdog."

"The Piano Lesson," directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson and starring Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, also received attention Sunday in the Times Style magazine. In a feature on dinner parties around the country, the play's cast was pictured eating pizza before a performance. It was gourmet pizza, Richardson Jackson disclosed.

As with Wilson, Kennedy's plays have been frequently published. If I don't get a chance to see "The Ohio State Murders" in person, I'll look forward to reading the play and other Kennedy works.

 

Anticipating Noah Baumbach's "White Noise"

At last a movie I'm looking forward to seeing: Noah Baumbach's "White Noise."

Although I consider the comic novel one of Don DeLillo's lesser works, I expect it to translate well to film, especially in Baumbach's hands.

Beginning with "The Squid and the Whale" and continuing through "Marriage Story," Baumbach has fused visual imagery and character-defining dialogue for a distinctive narrative style. An ethereal light illuminates the darkest emotional moments.

The movie stars actors whose work I've admired in a number of films: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle. I''ve especially come to enjoy the performances of Gerwig since her days in independent films. Driver has become for me the modern version of William Holden, perhaps my favorite Old Hollywood star.

DeLillo's book about a middle-aged professor who started the Department of Hitler Studies at a small college and whose blended family is threatened by a "toxic event" was for years considered un-filmable, largely because of DeLillo's cryptic, satiric dialogue.

Many of the pop cultural references are already dated. But Baumbauch has apparently employed much of DeLillo's speech in the film's script.

"White Noise" with its dread over environmental disaster has gained greater relevance as climate change worsens. I'm hoping Baumbach has turned the book into a cinematic classic.