TSI sent me this link a week or two back, and I meant to post it then. Consider this a rectification of that oversight. It’s a letter from JD Salinger to a producer, explaining to him why he wouldn’t sell movie rights to Catcher in the Rye.
The letter is especially interesting when one recalls that early versions of Catcher, appearing as chaptered short stories in the New Yorker, used a third person narration.
Whether you think Salinger was being paranoid or perspicacious will depend much on whether or not you think the movie version of, say, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, was a screaming success.
— Or whether you’re Jules Crittenden. In which case you can pronounce on both the artistic and thematic merits of the film without first bothering to watch it.
@Jules: ZING!
Just an aside: I like the scale and definition of the periods produced by Salinger’s typewriter. These here electronic periods, not so much, by contrast.
remember though this was before Zac Efron’s nosejob
If only one of the Culkins had grown tall and lanky.
Catcher with a stubbed Kieran was called Igby Goes Down. Which was actually a good flick — though the absence of a hunter’s cap threw me.
…but seriously, let’s just consider another corner of this argument– Salinger was as crazy as a wet bee hive. While he makes some entirely accurate and sensible arguments about preserving the artistic patina of the piece through the idiosyncatic voice of the narrator, when he drops a line like “Have you ever seen a child sitting cross-legged on a bed and looking right?” I’m thinking he’s either channeling Humpert Humpert or he’s an early candidate for Lithium.
Or he’s saying something about the stiffness of Shirley Temple.
Thanks for the link. Interesting read.
The solution to an unactable 13 y/o who is, and will always be without “X” is now know as animation. They are getting very good at that. I was subjected to “UP” t’other day, and actually enjoyed some of it.
Pixar’s Catcher in the Rye
What are movie titles we’ll only see after the apocalypse?
I think Salinger is right, but then I almost always like the book better than the movie with at least two notable exceptions: The Godfather, and the Lord of the Rings. Great novels and even very good novels(and I put Catcher in the Rye in this class) prompt us to create something unique. Certainly Salinger heard something unique in Holden’s voice, and most of us do too. Once we’ve heard it, it’s ours, and it would be damn hard for even a great actor to recreate it or another voice so good that it drives our first impression away. If a film version ever was made, I go see it, but I probably wouldn’t like it.
Never fly United Air lines. They hate you. Got that Chicago thug mentality working. From Shakir (Kill the infidel just oozes from his hate whitey soul) to Felicia who didn’t care what our tickets said, there is no flight from Atlanta to New York, it’s been as bad as a travel experience could possibly be both ways.
Why is donald always tryin’ to keep a brother like Shakir down? All Shakir is tryin’ to do is get along in the white man’s world, and just possibly get some action from that non-burka wearin’ hottie Felicia on the ramp after hours.
Shakir gonna show her what it looks like when the imam jumps out of the well…
Hollywood actually went against type and filmed a tasteful adaptation of Catcher in the Rye a few years ago called “The Water Boy”.
I’m actually getting choked up just thinking about it.
The angst… the angst…
Jaws. And the Exorcist. Both excellent books that made phenomenal movies. French Connection and Serpico, as well. Though those were more docudramas.
the #3 comment on that thread says it all
The Leftist mindset in a nutshell – a creator loses all rights to his/her creation as soon as it is made. Those who can make it into something else? THEY own it.
Hollywood will make a movie of someone else’s work but will hunt you down and bury you with lawyers if you excerpt or parody THEIR work.
feh.
Not surprising, the sacred isn’t even sacred to the left. Only the left is sacred to the left.
Scripting _Catcher_ would be like trying to describe a dream. So much of it depends on what’s known without speaking, and it can’t be conveyed by pained expressions or awkward, Bladerunneresque, narration. The whole story is inside Caulfield’s head. Change the scenery, the characters that interact with him, or their actions, and Caulfield still has to make the same journey, because it has little to do with the reality outside of his mind.
When someone tells you about their life, and the people in it, you’ve learned nothing about reality except that person’s perception. Casting real actors, playing the people in Caulfield’s life, gives them a reality that exists separately from his description. There’s no way to do that without imposing a judgment about Caulfield himself. The extent to which those characters match his description, the story would become a jumble of outside interpretations, imposed by the director, the scriptwriter, the actor, the set designer, the costume designer – even the person that does the actor’s hair and makeup – that would come between the viewer and the main character.
There are few novels that grant the reader the latitude of personal interpretation that _Catcher in the Rye_ does. Whatever Salinger hoped to convey, he was uniquely generous as an author. The restraint he shows is even more remarkable when you consider the enormous attachment he has for this character. There is no reveal at the end. Tom Robbins writes hundreds of pages of insistence that Sissy Hankshaw is super awesome, and still can’t resist sticking some extra !!!!11!!eleventy!!1!’s at the end – in the form of psychiatric approval – to make sure we know that we’re supposed to really, really, like her. Salinger lets his character’s voice stand on its own, without the props of scientific approval or third party affirmation; he gives us the gift of judging him for ourselves. Why would anyone that claims to love this book, so willingly hand that gift to the whims of the Sundance crowd?
Not to mention the porn release Catch Her in the Raw
I thought I was the only guy in the world who read Cowgirls. And, yeah, how much more suck was possible in one movie? Thankfully, I believe it was the budget process that left that question unaswered.
.
Didn’t they already make this movie and call it Forrest Gump?
/ducks and runs
“The Water Boy” ?