December Books

Print media not only endures, it thrives. The first issue of the Metrograph, the biannual magazine edited by Fireflies Press cofounder Annabel Brady-Brown, is out. And MUBI, the globe-spanning streaming service, production company, distributor, and publisher of Notebook in both its virtual and print manifestations, will launch MUBI Editions in April with Read Frame Type Film, a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou that explores the affinity between cinema and typography.

Paul Cronin, in the meantime, is as busy as ever at Sticking Place Books. He’s translated Nathan Réra’s Casualties of War: An Investigation, a study of Brian De Palma’s 1989 film that draws on Daniel Lang’s reporting for the New Yorker on the rape and murder of a Vietnamese woman by a squad of American soldiers. Réra’s Casualties of War will be out next week, and in February, Sticking Place will release Hollywood on the Tiber, Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner’s book, written in the 1970s, on the rise of Rome as the center of Europe’s film industry in the 1950s and ’60s.

Alexandra Seros has put together an impressive site for her forthcoming book, Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair. In a way, Farran Smith Nehme’s recent piece on Lupino as “one of the best, most vivid and original actresses in Hollywood” sets the stage for Seros’s critical study, which will be out next month.

Nearly fifty years ago, Julie Gilbert wrote a biography of her great-aunt, Edna Ferber, the writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1924 novel So Big, saw her 1926 novel Show Boat adapted as a Broadway musical and three films, and collaborated with George S. Kaufman on several plays, including Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936). Gilbert’s new book is Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, and in the Atlantic, Chris Vognar suggests that it “makes a fine companion to Don Graham’s 2018 history” of the making of Giant (1956). Directed by George Stevens, Giant stars Rock Hudson as a wealthy Texas rancher, Elizabeth Taylor as his Virginian wife, and James Dean as a ranch hand who strikes it rich when he discovers oil on his own little patch of land.

Vognar, who took a summer job in Texas thirty years ago and has been living in the Lone Star State ever since, explains why Texans, who were put off by the novel written by “a waggish, literary New Yorker born and raised in the Midwest,” embraced the movie. In the New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs finds that Giant Love is “a tender and patient homage to a titan of American letters who has fallen most grievously out of fashion.”

In the New Yorker, Paul Schrader talks about some of his favorite works of fiction, including Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. “But then, you know, truth be told,” says Schrader, “the best stories are still in the Bible. I remember sitting in church just reading the Old Testament stories. The preacher was doing something else, but I would just read one story after another. They are the oldest stories—Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve. We’re never going to stop telling them.”

Anyone looking forward to reading Cher’s thoughts on working with Robert Altman on Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), with Mike Nichols on Silkwood (1983), with Peter Bogdanovich on Mask (1985; her performance scored her a Best Actress award in Cannes), or with Norman Jewison on Moonstruck (1987; she won an Oscar!) will have to wait until the second volume of her memoir appears next year. The first volume of Cher begins with the turbulent history of her family leading up to her birth in 1946 and takes us through the rise, fall, rise, and eventual breakup of Sonny & Cher and her reemergence as a solo artist who has sold 100 million records worldwide.

“Decades before Madonna had reinventions and Taylor Swift had eras, Cher had comebacks,” writes Sophie Gilbert in the Atlantic. “Cher is a bracing read, peppered with caustic quips and self-effacing anecdotes, but fundamentally frank . . . I’m hard pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences. Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the twentieth century was no cakewalk.”

Vulture has an excerpt in which Cher writes about meeting and then moving in with Sonny Bono, and Justin Curto picks out a few highlights from other chapters. Cher had been lobbying to land a movie role for years when Francis Ford Coppola approached after one of her concerts and “told me how much he’d enjoyed my show and then, after a brief pause, added, ‘Why aren’t you making movies?’ I almost burst into tears and thought, How are you seeing something in me that no one else does?”

For the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, David Niven’s 1971 bestseller The Moon’s a Balloon is “the unchallenged champ of the Hollywood memoirs: glamorous, louche, exciting, amusing, name-dropping, ridiculous, outrageously sexual but seasoned with real tenderness and piquancy.” Backlisted hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller have been discussing books for nine years and consider Niven’s memoir to be “the most entertaining ever written.” A couple of weeks ago, they landed the ideal guest to talk about it with, Rupert Everett.

Talk Easy host Sam Fragoso recently spoke with Josh Brolin about From Under the Truck, and as Malcolm Forbes writes in the Los Angeles Times, this “is not your average memoir. Instead of a linear narrative of chronological events, Brolin’s account darts backward and forward through the years and resembles a jumbled patchwork of recollections and meditations. In places it is scrappy and disjointed. But there is method in Brolin’s madness because he manages to keep the whole thing hanging together, captivating his reader with his take on what, to date, has been a tumultuous life and a varied career.”

Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy has come up in a couple of previous roundups, but let’s mention that in the Wall Street Journal, Farran Smith Nehme finds that the book “preserves Mr. Pacino’s personality, with all his intelligence, his wit, and his eagerness to talk about the theater history he loves,” while at the same time: “If you like your star memoirs with a side of dish, Sonny Boy may disappoint.”

In Prospect, Tom Shone writes about how Pacino “lends Shakespearean gravitas to characters many miles from Stratford” and calls Sonny Boy “ultimately another winning performance from the actor, who self-deprecatingly calls himself ‘dumb as a donut’ but whose instincts and intuitions run unusually deep, and whose debt to where he is from seems forever unpaid: ‘My whole life is a moonshot.’”

Turning to brief updates on books addressed in earlier roundups, we begin with John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, which Bilge Ebiri finds “really extraordinary” and “loaded with new information and insights about perhaps our greatest living filmmaker.” Bleasdale hosts a vital podcast, Writers on Film, and over the past couple of weeks, he’s spoken with Tom Shone about Malick’s Badlands (1973), with filmmaker Ian Nathan about Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), and with critic and programmer Hugo Emmerzael about The New World (2005).

Bleasdale’s other recent guests include Joseph McBride, who discusses his new book, George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director, and Tim Robey, whose Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops is an “exhilarating whistle-stop tour of some of the biggest financial disasters in Hollywood history,” as Thomas W. Hodgkinson describes it in Literary Review. “One of the joys of this book is the excuse it offers to rewatch, or catch for the first time, some of these stinkers.”

In Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, Carrie Courogen balances “the mythos and the pathos of May through a mix of first- and secondhand sources,” writes Kat Sachs in the Notebook. “Even as the book grounds May’s lore in research, it respects the mystique that has proven crucial to her sense of humor.” We should mention here that Elizabeth Alsop’s critical study Elaine May will be out next month.

In Dorothy Parker in Hollywood,Gail Crowther “emphasizes that she was a lifelong activist,” notes Chris Daley in Alta. “As both a writer and a woman, Parker suffered. But it’s not just the discrimination and sexist condescension she faced, or even the struggle for reproductive autonomy, that resonate for us now; it’s also the fight against fascism, the strikes against the studios, and the battle over intellectual property.”

Christopher Schobert’s latest round of recommendations at the Film Stage includes Violet Lucca’s David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, featuring interviews, “cogent analysis,” and a foreword by Viggo Mortensen; Adam Woodward’s The Worlds of Wes Anderson; guides to the films of Alfred Hitchcock,Joel and Ethan Coen, and Quentin Tarantino; and De Palma on De Palma: Conversations with Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud.

Katie Lee Ellison, who hosts the literary reading series Nonfiction for No Reason, recommends Tisa Bryant’s “mind-bender” Unexplained Presence, which, as publisher Wave Books puts it, “traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger’s Darling, Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Ellison also pitches Laura Paul’s Film Elegy: “Formatted to look like words projected onto a movie theater screen, Paul creates an evocative tribute to the medium as well as to the filmmaker Amy Halpern. Don’t miss it.”

Esther Zuckerman, whose work you may have seen in the New York Times or Vanity Fair, has a new book out, Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom-Coms from the Screwball Era to Today. And Ciné-Passion, the thirty-sixth volume in the Poster Collection series from the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, looks pretty spectacular.