THANK YOU, MIKE NICHOLS. You and Elaine May instantly became famous with your  brilliant 1950's comedy recording on RELATIONSHIPS.  The country laughed and was never the same again. You continued on by yourself  - as a director - and again became instantly famous and the country was never the same. I need mention only "The Graduate." The leading actor was not the blond WASP Robert Redford type but someone who looked like Everyman. 

Your choice of Dustin Hoffman was transformational to the entire film industry.  You  boosted a character actor into the position of leading man. Who followed? The likes of the Al Pacinos and Robert de Neros.

Mr. Nichols, you are known for your urbane sophistication bordering on the erudite, yet you make movies about everyone. I wish I had known you personally, Mike. I wish you could have talked through a long afternoon about your good luck knowing early in your life what you wanted to do, AND your good luck in having the gift for it. I would have given you a copy of my novel The Provider that so well works the point about a person who does not have both. And you would have said, "There, for the grace of God, go I."

THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAY continues to bring in wonderful reviews about Concerning Georgia Stekker. Take a look at this one:

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Emily's review Nov 07, 14

"I was totally taken back with how much I loved this book! Starting out, this book just felt so much more sophisticated and intelligent than most of the books I have read recently. I felt like I was reading a classic.

"Georgia Stekker was a starry-eyed dreamer who was full of life and plans for the future. She felt things [too] deeply and she loved too much. She got mixed up with the wrong kind of man and, after his betrayal, was never the same again. Her intensity in the years to come was turned toward an elaborate scheme to see her former lover burn.

"Georgia was so easy to relate to and it was really fascinating to observe her character development throughout the story. This book seems to me to be a warning to those who want revenge. Georgia devoted her entire life toward her revenge strategy and totally lost herself. She was so successful and she had so much potential but she gave up true happiness to see Larry go down in flames."

ONCE AGAIN - THE ICE CREAM DIVA 

The short gal with me wearing the raccoon jacket is the ice cream diva in my October 1 newsletter. Here again is the piece: 

Our attachment to ice cream, rooted in childhood, is pervasive in the American fabric. I, for one, embrace it in my novels. But then there is my sister-in-law.  When she enters an ice cream parlor and approaches the glass counter, she asks the clerk, "Are you an ice cream lover?" If the response is NO, she says, "Then you may not wait on me." 

I am reading Tennessee Williams:  Pilgrimage of the Flesh the new biography (Sept. 2014) by John Lahr. Twelve years in the writing, over 700 pages, John Lahr is one of our preeminent theatre critics.

Lahr says that when TENNESSEE WILLIAMS came into his great fame in the 1950's with his play "Streetcar Named Desire," he also changed theatre with it. He wrote about his personal sufferings He wrote against the CULTURE OF CONFORMITY of the 1950's. 

 The growing national obsession with Communism was also a measure of the country's insecurity about the new abundance, which had brought the bright era of property" within range of more citizens than ever before. Fueled by the single greatest rise of individual wealth in world history, the middle class grew to include 60 percent of Americans. In the same period, thirteen million new homes were bought; the number of two-car families doubled; and the nation, which was home to only 6 percent of the world's population, was consuming a third of the world's goods and services and producing two-thirds of its manufacturers. The suburbs mushroomed; food and hotel chains spread. The increase in consumption led inevitably to a homogenization of taste; a pall of sameness settled over the land. In this, television had a seismic effect. Madison Avenue's total television billings were $12.3 million in 1948; by 1951, the figure had ballooned to $128 million. In 1949, Americans owned about one million television sets; by the end of the next decade, forty-eight million people did. They watched, on average, six hours a day. 'Radio was abandoned like bones at a barbeque,' the comedian Fred Allen quipped. In a real, as well as a symbolic way, society had become spellbound.

The journalist and film critic Nora Sayre wrote in her memoir Previous Conventions,  'You heard a lot about fitting in, molds were awaiting you; professional molds, marital molds, ways of comporting yourself so that others would not think you were peculiar.'

Arthur Miller complained in the New York Times, "'Do you realize that there is scarcely a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station or cinema in the whole country that doesn't represent practically the same old tired, blind, bitter and desiccated attitude toward life?'

The Broadway theatre, which, more than any other art, survived by accurately reading the public mood, registered the new climate with an unmistakable tameness. 'A lizard-like dormancy seems to be upon us.' Arthur Miller complained in the New York Times. 'The creative mind seems to have lost its heat.'"

Williams, in his romantic rebellion, was always pitched against the restriction of conformity. He wrote about his interior life, his sufferings, his terrors, his longing for love, during this conformist period in the American conformist culture. He was Blanche in "Streetcar Named Desire."  He was Mrs. Stone in "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone." In "Suddenly Last Summer," he was the sacrificial boy. He was Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

"10" wrote 70 plays, all of them, according to John Lahr, were very very good. This is a prodigious output, well beyond that of most other playwrights.

He suffered the roller coaster of the artist's life. Up again and down again. 10 endured the torments of loneliness, his unhappy family background, fame, primal love, lost youth, homosexuality, illusion, this shy, sensitive man, and wrote about every one of them.

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS - Shel Silverstein

40th anniversary!!!!!  

 MOVIE - "CHOCOLAT"

While reading a number of highly-reviewed novels recommended by book clubs, I feel hijacked with activities that I wish would end but don't? Worse, I BEGAN TO DOUBT MY OWN TASTE. Then recently, one morning about 5 o'clock I woke up, clunked my way into the kitchen, arranged my cup of coffee, and, not yet fully awake, staggered over to the TV, clicked, and on came the French movie "Chocolat." I hope you've seen it. (It is based on a novel by Joanne Harris.)

After WWII, Juliette Binoche with her 6-year-old daughter drifts into a repressed French village in Burgundy and she opens a chocolate shop during the beginning of the Lenten season. Her chocolate is a metaphor for pleasure. The people who taste it (i.e., indulge in a pleasure that lacks  moral virtue) lived burdened by fear, restrictions, and inhibitions. After eating the delicious chocolate, they break through their bonds and take control over their lives; they indulge their needs and begin to enjoy life.

"Chocolat" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was also nominated for four Golden Globes. I said to myself, "Remember, Evelyn, to be loyal to your own drummer, to continue to read and write the kind of novels that fulfill your artistic pleasure. Enjoy your chocolate."

The novel does not offer any likable characters or interior character development; instead, a pattern of action and reaction; it is more of a mystery. The leading character is a Bernie Madoff type. When the Iranian Revolution exploded, he turned people into the government to be tortured, and then solicited the families for payment to free them. The author told us that his type was not uncommon.

The supposed magic realism is not such; the author says it is rather their culture with an oral tradition of preserving family stories that include the freakish. The family name and line weave through the generations like a hook rug. If you're looking for a plot, forget it. It's not that kind of a novel. It turns out to be a expose.

Yes, an expose. One resident of Beverly Hills said to the author, "This is not the Beverly Hills I know. Mine is a very nice place to live."

Nahai writes about a highly visible people in a famous locale: Tehrangeles - Beverly Hills and Westwood.

The novel did not touch my heart in the way other ethnic novels do; I could not relate to the characters. But perhaps that was not the author's intention. I see the people trying to make up for their dislocation by holding tightly together and spending gargantuan amounts of money. The novel moves from surface to surface. I wanted to get inside their heads and hearts. 

 

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