For No Good Reason

Odds Against Transcendence

An excerpt from the second chapter of Revolutionary Road: "Around the corner he found one of the lesser gangsters talking with a plump girl who had caused a thirty-second rupture in the first act by missing her entrance cue..."

If Mendes goes for a laugh by recreating this "thirty-second rupture" (reducing it to a split-second missed cue and inserting it in-sequence), feel free to walk out of the theater. All that follows will be failure. Guaranteed.

Unemphatic Good Looks

Just started reading Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, and couldn't help but chuckle at this description of the novel's protagonist, Franklin H. Wheeler:

He was neat and solid, a few days less than thirty years old, with closely cut black hair and the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise (Why Pay More?). But for all its lack of structural distinction, his face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a fine actor, but his chiseled-by-the-gods visage is a paean to "structural distinction". I'm still quite looking forward to Sam Mendes's film, but I'll continue to read the book with Richard Benjamin circa Goodbye Columbus in mind. Or Charles Bronson in Hard Times. (Seriously, an early '70s Pacino might've worked. Today, I'd go with Kate Winslet's Little Children co-star, Patrick Wilson.)

As for Ms. Winslet as April Wheeler, this isn't nearly as hard to stomach:

She was twenty-nine, a tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could distort, and she seemed ideally cast in the role. It didn't even matter that bearing two children had left her a shade too heavy in the hips and thighs, for she moved with the shyly sensual grace of maidenhood; anyone happening to glance at Frank Wheeler, the round-faced, intelligent-looking young man who sat biting his fist in the last row of the audience, would have said he looked more like her suitor than her husband.

Emphasis mine, of course.

"He Did A 'Carvey' To His Own Show"

Further to my favorite interview of this year, here's the first episode of THE DANA CARVEY SHOW. I still can't believe they led with this (Louis C.K.-written) sketch. Daring and suicidal.



In case you didn't know, Charlie Kaufman was on the writing staff of this extraordinarily short-lived show.

Who's The Albatross?

Empathy

From the preface to Joan Didion's exquisite Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic. I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"; the pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.) What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

The Only Film That's Been Shelved Longer Than Kenneth Lonergan's MARGARET

John McKay's adaptation of PG Wodehouse's Picadilly Jim, starring Sam Rockwell, Tom Wilkinson, Brenda Blethyn, Allison Janney, Frances O'Connor and Austin Pendleton. How do you miss with that cast performing that material? Movie wrapped in early 2004.