Stream Films ABOUT Notable Authors XI

Love the author? Rereading something pithy? Here are films – fiction and documentary- about the person.

J. D. Salinger

Salinger 2013 Directed by Shane Salerno. Copious research went into this documentary, but it sorely needs editing. There are a a lot of talking heads (writers, editors, critics, biographers, friends, psychologists, fellow soldiers, actors, exes, his daughter, and the author himself) and too many journalist stories of tracking down the icon that came to little or naught. Extensive WWII footage strongly suggests it was war that molded the author. A gimmick of showing actor/Salinger in front of a movie screen with battle scenes is irritating.

On the other hand, rarely seen footage and photos capture the selectively elusive personality throughout his life. Several ex-wives and at-the-time, very young girlfriends add personal experience. History – from prep school and Park Avenue (all the while presenting himself to peers as struggling), through obsessive short story submissions to The New Yorker (his Holy Grail), military service, wild success and withdrawal To New Hampshire – is nicely handled.

Salinger was a perfectionist with often childlike charm, but an immense ego. He referred to his characters as if alive. When he moved to New England, the writer built a shack on the property in which he worked for days or weeks – no one allowed, not even family. Not as much of a recluse as advertised, however, he was often seen around town and socialized with local friends. It was cloying fans who chased and disturbed him. Holden, the character in Catcher in the Rye, he said, robbed him of a normal life. There’s much of interest here.

A safe full of material slated by his will to be released by The Salinger Literary Trust between 2015 and 2020 (it hasn’t been) confirms he wrote until his death in 2010 at 91. On Amazon Prime with HBO Trial.

Coming through the Rye 2016 Written and Directed by James Steven Sadwith. A coming of age film based on the director’s own teenage quest to find J.D. Salinger. It’s 1969 when 16 year-old Jamie Schwartz (Alex Wolff) tries to keep a boarding school friend from drugs and drinking by telling dorm authorities he’s tormented by the student body. Jamie has one crush and one potential friend from a local girls’ school -needless to say, not the same person.

Seeing himself in JD Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield, he adapts The Catcher in The Rye into a play for his senior project. In order for the school to perform it, however, Jamie must get the author’s permission. Letters of inquiry go unanswered. The boy decides to go in search of his reclusive hero. At the girls’ school, DeeDee (Stefania LaVie Owen) agrees to give him a lift. They drive from Pennsylvania to the New Hampshire area where Salinger’s purported to live.

Surprisingly, they find the house and its occupant. Jamie is unequivocally told no. Unable to talk the sensible DeeDee into accompanying him, Jamie decides to hitchhike to Maine for a reason integral to the script. She talks him out of waiting until daylight. The rest of the film shows what happens when the boy returns to school and the play is performed. It’s a sweet, credible story.

“The movie is about eighty-five percent accurate with what happened up to the moment when I went to search for J.D. Salinger, and from that point it’s about ninety-nine percent accurate.” James Steven Sadwith.  Free with Amazon Prime.

John Irving

The World According to John Irving 2018 Directed by Andre Schaefer. Up close and personal with Irving and his work: the author himself, voice-over reading, interviews with people on which he based fictionalized characters – doctors, a tattoo artist (Irving personally tattooed his wife with a tiny star for the experience), an organist, a chef … all of whom say he described professions with exactitude and understanding. “I’m the architect of a novel before writing it.” We see many locations in which his books are set and the house on a Canadian lake where the author lives and works.

“Wrestling was the first thing I wanted to be good at enough to make sacrifices. It taught me the discipline to rewrite and instilled the idea that repetition is necessary to master any craft. (He still wrestles.) I tend to live in the process, not the finish.” We briefly meet Irving’s wife, Janet. She’s game to travel in pursuit of literary groundwork, never knowing where they’ll end up. The author speaks about the way having children changed his outlook. We get a discreet glimpse. Genial and direct. Free on Amazon Prime.

Philip Roth

Philip Roth Unmasked American Masters 2013 Directed by Livia Manera and William Karel. Predominantly Roth talking about himself, the film also features novelist Jonathan Franzen and New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, both of whom are big fans, as well as friend Mia Farrow. No one has anything negative to say about misogyny, male ego, or the compulsion to control detailed by second wife Claire Bloom in her memoir.

We learn that he was inactively Jewish (apparent in semi-autobiographical fiction), born in Newark to second generation Americans, rented books from a local pharmacy as a child, and attended Bucknell University and The University of Chicago. Roth hit the ground running winning 1959’s National Book Award for Fiction for Goodbye, Columbus and had a volume cooking the entire remainder of his life.

The author shows dark, wry, infrequent humor (the story about finding himself a grave site is a highlight), self-importance, precision, and dislike of old age. He reads his own work aloud, including frequent sexual passages, quite well. “Books are meant to rouse you. When I’m writing, the only reader that counts is myself.” This is a book by book journey for curious appreciators. Free with Amazon Prime.

James Baldwin

I Am Not Your Negro 2007 Based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, “Remember This House.” Directed by Raoul Peck. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. This powerful documentary manages to be personal, historical, and universal. Baldwin’s feelings about and recollection of civil rights leaders Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers are woven into an unsparing racial history of this country without a word of incendiary language.

Baldwin is educated, impassioned, articulate, measured, perceptive. Supportive visuals are well chosen, carefully edited. Painful and sobering. A film that should be screened for every school in the country – especially now. Free with Amazon Prime.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am 2019 American Masters  Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Well edited, visually enjoyable (artwork and period footage enhance) with a great deal of narration by the likeable, steely author herself. If you already read Morrison, this will be entertaining and illuminating, if not, you’ll likely start.

Toni Morrison rose out of poverty with confidence and pride. She went to Howard University – surprised to learn they didn’t teach black authors – secured graduate degrees, raised two sons with only family help, taught, and simultaneously worked as a Random House editor while writing her own books, before becoming a full time author.

“The assumption is that the reader is a white person and that troubled me…I didn’t want to speak for black people, I wanted to speak to and from among them…Even Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison didn’t really talk about it. The Invisible Man-invisible to who?!…If you can only be tall when someone’s under you, then you have a serious problem.” (Toni Morrison) Respected authors note that in Morrison’s books, drama and tragedy is played out in everyday lives, that she puts women at the center of epic narratives, that four centuries are covered in her work. Free with Amazon Prime.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling)

Cross Creek 1983 Based on Rawlings’ memoir. Directed by Martin Ritt. Starring Mary Steenburgen. When a book is again rejected by publishers, writer Marjorie Rawlings buys an orange grove in Florida, leaves her husband, and sets up in a dilapidated cabin near what turns out to be a failing grove. She makes friends with locals. Norton Baskin (Peter Coyote), Marsh Turner (Rip Torn), and his daughter, Ellie (Dana Hill), who keeps a deer fawn named Flag as a pet, Geechee (Alfre Woodard), a black woman who offers to help, and a young couple who rent a cabin on the land.

Rawlings and her neighbors unblock an irrigation vein for her grove; it begins to improve. She settles in to a quiet life and writes a gothic novel. Rejection arrives with advice to chose a subject she knows. When Flag gets out and once again eats the family’s sustaining vegetables, Marsh is forced to shoot him. He goes on a guilty bender, ends up in a tussle with his gun and the sheriff, and dies.

Ellie blames Marjorie who, heartbroken, takes a boat downstream for several days. She returns to find Geechee has stayed. When the grove is threatened by frost, neighbor’s show up to help. Ellie apologizes. Marjorie has become one of them. Rent on Amazon Prime.

Top photo: Bigstock

About Alix Cohen (1706 Articles)
Alix Cohen is the recipient of ten New York Press Club Awards for work published on this venue. Her writing history began with poetry, segued into lyrics and took a commercial detour while holding executive positions in product development, merchandising, and design. A cultural sponge, she now turns her diverse personal and professional background to authoring pieces about culture/the arts with particular interest in artists/performers and entrepreneurs. Theater, music, art/design are lifelong areas of study and passion. She is a voting member of Drama Desk and Drama League. Alix’s professional experience in women’s fashion fuels writing in that area. Besides Woman Around Town, the journalist writes for Cabaret Scenes, Broadway World, TheaterLife, and Theater Pizzazz. Additional pieces have been published by The New York Post, The National Observer’s Playground Magazine, Pasadena Magazine, Times Square Chronicles, and ifashionnetwork. She lives in Manhattan. Of course.