Subject: Re: Salinger Profile on Bravo
Omlor@aol.com
Date: Tue Nov 28 2000 - 10:51:57 GMT
Will asks about the Bravo profile.
It was rather awful.
I'm still not sure if it was the same one the BBC did. I'm sending Tim my
copy of the tape, since I never saw the BBC one.
This one was rather useless, I think. It started out with the Chapman /
Hinckley sensationalism stuff and never settled down into anything better.
Ms. Maynard was prominently featured in the second half, telling us, for
instance, when she first realized that she was just Phoebe and Esme for Jerry
(it apparently took quite a while for her to read "For Esme..." and then, of
course, she remembered that in the picture of her on the Times Magazine cover
that first caught Jerry's attention, she was wearing a man's watch that was
too big for her tiny wrist...).
The director also used a bunch of cheesy stock footage to represent the
different decades of Salinger's life. Cliches were rampant -- disaffected
teens racing cars stood for the 1950s, for example. Lots of shots of the
bears at the zoo and the carousel in the park as well.
There were the usual reports of the bank vault filled with manuscripts and
the "Jerry-as-Holden finally running away after being traumatized by the war"
speculations and the first person accounts by obsessed fans of their
disappointing encounters with the man.
I think *E! True Hollywood Story* would have done a much better job. Or
maybe VH1's "Behind the Music" could be changed to "Behind the Writing" for a
week. Of course then Jerry would have to have had a "serious, even life
threatening battle with drug abuse and then finally checked himself into
rehab and worked his way out so that now he sees the light at the end of the
tunnel and is living a happy life out of the glare of the spotlights with his
new found family and a new perspective about the things that really
matter..." Or something like that.
Ah well.
I guess A&E Biography is out of the question (lawsuits galore, I'm sure).
Anyway, while watching the Bravo one I sometimes flashed back to poor Woody
and the people putting together that goofy bio-documentary of Alan Alda in
"Crimes and Misdemeanors." "If it bends... it's funny. If it breaks..."
Well, there it is. (This section of C&D includes the only time in a Woody
Allen film where anyone mentions a certain novelist much loved and written
about by this bananafish, btw. Extra points for those who remember the scene
and the name. Sorry, points not available to those who know me.)
Anyway, in all the thing was a disappointment.
That's it from here,
--John
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