UNDER THE INFLUENCE brings some of world’s top literary figures to the screening room at the Crosby Street Hotel. Each writer introduces a film that has influenced their work. The film is screened, followed by a discussion with MICHAEL MAREN then cocktails, canapes and a book signing arrange by local bookstore McNALLY JACKSON.
On January, 23, Roy Blount, Jr. visits Writers-on-Film to talk about The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and its influence on comedy and his writing. Tickets are now on sale.
On October 3, I'll be talking with Pulitzer Prize recipient Michael Cunningham about Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He says "I saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller in college, and it was by some lengths the most beautiful movie I'd ever seen. Lush and lyrical but also deeply real, free of sentimentality. I was particularly thrilled by McCabe's love for Mrs. Miller, who is tougher than any of the men. McCabe loves her, in part, because he's finally met his match, in female form. Although I haven't been exactly conscious of it, I realize that throughout my writing career, I've been trying to duplicate some of the thrills of that movie: the gorgeousness that doesn't exclude mud and excrement, the woman who is nobody's fool. When I was asked to pick a film for the series, it took me less than a minute to choose McCabe and Mrs. Miller."
Join us for a discussion of the film and its relationship to Cunningham's work. For reservations, contact The Crosby Street Hotel at 212 226 6400.
6/27/11 Discussing Pulp Fiction with Jennifer Egan
Quentin Tarentino's upending of chronology in PULP FICTION electrified JENNIFER EGAN when she first saw it, years ago. She remembers deciding, quite consciously, *I have to do something like that*. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD is where she was finally able to make it happen.
Come watch the film and join the discussion with Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan on Monday, June 27th.
The next event in the Writers-on-Film series will feature JIM SHEPARD on April 11. Jim's new book YOU THINK THAT'S BAD will be published on March 22, (less than a week before Jim joins us in Sirenland). When asked to compare the book and the film, Jim wrote: "You Think That's Bad shares many obsessive preoccupations with AGUIRRE, and with Werner Herzog'
s aesthetic project in general." More recently, Jim told Bomb Magazine:
I grew up on movies, like many, if not most, of my generation, and so of course they’ve affected the way my imagination works. Various reviewers have noted that my stuff tends toward the visual and the visceral, for example. And though I have a lot of voice-driven stories, I wouldn’t say that my fiction tends toward the ruminative.
Jim wrote a fascinating essay on Aguirre in The Believer, back in September 2004 in which he contrasts Herzog's film with the Oscar-winning epic, Lawrence of Arabia, which came out a decade earlier. You couldn't find two more different films both in style and intent. And it's hard to imagine two leading men more different than the smooth, pretty Peter O'Toole and rough-as-gravel Klaus Kinski. The contrast between the films says a lot about the intervening decade. I can't wait for this discussion.
Paul and me discussing "The Best Years of Our Lives."
The initial reviews have been good. We were covered in the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy, and in the Overnight New York blog, which said:
Auster knows the movie intimately; a character in Sunset Park, his latest novel, watches it obsessively. (A low-key book signing followed the screening.) And Maren’s questions were skilled prompts.
When I asked Paul Auster which
film he'd want to screen for the inaugural Writers-on-Film event, he didn't heisitate: The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 William Wyler classic about three soldiers struggling to adapt to civilian life after the second world war. The film, he explained to me, figures prominently in his latest novel, Sunset Park.
