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Rendez-Vous With New French Writing

French screenwriters are unstoppable at the moment. Two of the best films of the last five years — Michael Haneke’s Amour and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors — hailed from France; in the last six months alone, we’ve seen The Past, Stranger By the Lake and Blue is the Warmest Color. These films have taken cinematic expression to new heights in the sexual, emotional and cerebral realms. So it is joyeux news indeed that the 19th annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance Films, is currently in full swing at cinemas across New York. We cheer the sudden influx of great original writing into movie theatres glutted most of the year with remakes, sequels and adaptations. We cheer the effort Rendez-Vous put in to flying in directors and stars to talk to eager audiences after screenings. We cheer the IFC, BAM, Film Society of Lincoln Center and the French Institute for devoting their programming to twenty-four untested subtitled films. I was lucky enough to catch three of them in the last few days. Spoiler alerts! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzSJ5mijWyA François Ozon’s new film, Young & Beautiful, opens on a teenage girl sunbathing topless on an immaculate beach while […]

Bloody Brilliant Michael Friedman

Michael Friedman is the composer and lyricist behind an astonishing range of theatrical output over the last fifteen years. He wrote his first musical for The Civilians, a downtown theatre group he helped co-found in 2001. Canard, Canard, Goose? was also The Civilians’ first show, taking as its subject alleged geese abuse on the set of the Hollywood movie Fly Away Home. The Civilians’ method of working is a little like verbatim theatre in that the shows are based on interviews with real people. What’s different is that the final product is a heightened version of what emerged from those interviews, as you can probably tell from the sublimely silly Canard (the plot of which effectively disintegrates when the Civilians team realises that the movie wasn’t in fact shot in the hamlet where it was set but in Ontario). You can hear the whole show in this podcast recording of the 10th anniversary concert performance at Joe’s Pub. Canard set the offbeat tone for an eclectic career. Friedman went on to write the music for a series of shows, some with The Civilians, some not, including In the Bubble, based on the John Travolta movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble; the children’s show Katie Couric’s The Brand […]

Blog Post of a Wimpy Kid

6 March marked this year’s World Book Day in the UK, so time once again for Professor Keith Topping of the University of Dundee to publish his annual “What Kids Are Reading” report (downloadable here). It’s a fascinating atomisation of the reading habits of nearly half a million British children aged five to sixteen, one which is traditionally dominated by that great Pied Piper of children’s literature, Roald Dahl. But not this year, for it appears that the children of the UK have joined their American cousins on the spectacularly successful Diary of a Wimpy Kid bandwagon. Or should I say tour bus… To mark the publication of the eighth book in Jeff Kinney‘s terrific Wimpy Kid series, Hard Luck, the author embarked on a grand tour of the United States and Europe on this bus. It’s a big one, but after all, Greg Heffley, the middle-school hero of the series, is something of a superstar. According to the Wall Street Journal, Hard Luck sold upwards of a million copies the week it was published, from a staggering 5.5 million-book print run. In Topping’s study, the first seven volumes of the series occupied the top seven spots in the list of books most read by pupils in Year 6 […]

“everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes”: Susan Cheever’s E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever’s new biography of E.E. Cummings (Pantheon Books, 2014), “one of the great and most important American poets”, begins with the two of them meeting. By the second half of his career Cummings had become a successful public speaker, supplementing the income he brought home with his poetry by accepting invitations to colleges and public venues across the US, and in 1958 he addressed Cheever’s girls’ school. Afterwards Cheever and her father, also a famous writer at this point, drove Cummings back to New York. He’d made quite an impression. “It wasn’t those in authority who were always right,” recalls Cheever; “it was the opposite. I saw that being right was a petty goal — being free was the thing to aim for.” Cummings’s life and work, in Cheever’s splendid book, exist in a state of constant tension between these forces of freedom and authority. Edward Estlin Cummings was born into a well-to-do family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He was well loved and received generous encouragement in his artistic development from his mother, who greatly desired a poet-son, and his uncle George, one of many influences on his early poetic development. Estlin’s was a mostly happy childhood — […]

Jay McInerney’s The Good Life

In a 2005 article for the Guardian entitled “The uses of invention”, Jay McInerney set out to counter the prevalent concern that literature was no longer up to the task, following 9/11, of processing world events. His contribution to the proof was The Good Life (2006), a novel set in the autumn of 2001 in the bedrooms of wealthy Manhattanites dealing with the aftermath of the destruction downtown. It was McInerney’s seventh novel and a sequel of sorts to 1992’s Brightness Falls. The book’s central insight is given to Luke McGavock around halfway through: “Personally is maybe the only perspective we have.” Like much of the fiction published since 9/11, McInerney’s novel is not principally about terrorism or the fall of the World Trade Center. Instead, it examines the effects of the attacks on individuals. His characters’ lives are all balanced somewhat precariously before September 11; the subject of the book becomes how such an epochal event can change perspectives in unforeseeable ways. Luke is something of an avatar for McInerney, who also spent the weeks following 9/11 working in a soup kitchen downtown, and he is occasionally blessed with an almost authorial clairvoyance. At a benefit at Central Park Zoo: The women were beautiful in their gowns, or at least glamorous […]

This Is Not A Man

Alexander Pope recited in the style of William Shatner. A French general, born into slavery in Saint-Domingue, locked in a war of attrition with Napoleon Bonaparte. A live link to Hollywood during Oscars week. It could only be the House of SpeakEasy. “This Is Not A Man” delivered another Seriously Entertaining mix of music, comedy, history and literature in the warm embrace of City Winery in SoHo. First out of the gate was Dana Vachon, author of Wall Street satire Mergers & Acquisitions. He kicked off with a couple of thumbnail sketches — “One story that doesn’t work involves my father and a terrorist…” — before setting off on a globe-trotting assignment set by Vanity Fair. It was a tale of data-mining billionaires, early-morning water calisthenics in Singapore, and uber-alpha-male English expats all called Roger MacMillan, topped off with sage words of advice from Don DeLillo. “I asked him what young novelists should be writing about,” said Vachon, “and he said immediately, without hesitation, the destruction of the environment.” The comedian Steve Coogan, who stands to win his first Oscar this weekend for his screenplay for Philomena, spoke to SpeakEasy founder Amanda Foreman via Facetime from Los Angeles. Coogan has enjoyed a phenomenally successful career in comedy, but Philomena is […]

The Chronicles of Fry

Many times while reading The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry‘s bestselling memoir, I was forced to confront sadly the likelihood that the world will no longer need my autobiography. Not that he and I have lived the same life exactly. I haven’t written a dozen bestselling books or had a show on Broadway or been nominated for a Golden Globe or made a series of award-winning documentaries or presented a fantastically popular gameshow — or even published eighteen and a half thousand tweets, though at least I can realistically aim to. Nevertheless, I found myself so wholeheartedly agreeing with so many of his observations on life that anything I might have to say is now effectively redundant. We even share a passion for Ricicles. But enough about me. The Fry Chronicles, through a series of words beginning with the letter C, tells the story of Fry’s life through late adolescence and the first decade or so of his remarkable career. Cereal, candy, cigarettes, Cundall Manor School (where he briefly taught), Cambridge, coming out, [University] Challenge, The Cellar Tapes (the Footlights revue co-written by Fry that won the first Perrier Comedy Award in Edinburgh), cars, commercials, celibacy, and of course his colleague — “M’Coll” — Hugh Laurie, his best friend […]

Curtain Call: This Is Not A Man

We’re just days away from our February show, “This Is Not a Man”. Speechless with excitement, it seems only right that we hand over to our six guests to introduce themselves. So without further ado… Tom Reiss won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for his latest book, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. “It’s a great, forgotten, unknown, erased African-American success story,” he says, “and a story of a moment in time that really should realign our understanding of the history of race and race relations in the west.” Here he is talking about the origins of the book, which PEN judges called “a miracle of research”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssq7QRhm0x4 Steve Coogan could be the worthy winner of an Academy Award next Sunday. He and Jeff Pope are nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for Philomena. Looking ahead, Coogan’s film Alan Partridge, released last year in the UK as Alpha Papa, is available on demand and via iTunes next Thursday (February 27) and you can catch it in US cinemas from April 4. In a short trip to the UK last year, I actively didn’t see friends so that I could make […]

A Thousand Natural Shocks: The Novels of Susan Minot

Susan Minot’s latest book, Thirty Girls (Knopf, 2014), is her first novel in over a decade and a significant departure from her earlier work. The girls of the title are the real-life prisoners of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda captured from their convent school in 1996. Five died in captivity, and the last to escape returned to Uganda in 2009. Thirty Girls has been getting great reviews — the New York Times calls it “a novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence” and says that “to ignore Minot’s book would be a serious mistake” (read Fiammetta Rocco’s full review here) — and we’re delighted to welcome Susan Minot to the House of SpeakEasy. Minot made her name with work of a less geopolitical hue. Her first novel, Monkeys, published in 1986, was a family saga, of which more below. This was followed by the collection Lust and Other Stories (1989), the historical novel Folly (1993), and the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996). The latter was closely followed by Evening (1998), the opening chapter of which you can read here. In 2002 came Rapture, a novella that deconstructs a doomed relationship. Five years later a movie adaptation of Evening was released starring Vanessa Redgrave and Claire Danes and written by Minot and Michael Cunningham (The Hours). Quoting Hamlet, […]

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