J.D. Salinger: “”If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies.”
“I can understand somebody going to the movies because there’s nothing else to do, but when somebody really wants to go, and even walks fast so as to get there quicker, then it depresses hell out of me. Especially if I see millions of people standing in one of those long, terrible lines, all the way down the block, waiting with this terrific patience for seats and all.”
Holden Caulfield, Catcher In The Rye
Like his most famous protagonist, J.D. Salinger doesn’t appear to have been much of a movie fan. Nobody got rights to film his books, though many tried – “save for Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, which was made into a 1949 movie entitled My Foolish Heart, that reportedly caused great consternation and unhappiness with Salinger” (Kim Morgan). Somehow Salinger himself ended up a character in one of my favourite books, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (which played brilliantly with the whole notion of the biographical fallacy), but when the story moved to the silver screen in an otherwise faithful adaptation, Salinger became a similarly reclusive but more political (and more fictional, not to mention much blacker) writer, Terence Mann.
Kim Morgan has posted an entertaining piece at MSN Movies about Salinger and cinema, where she considers films (including Field Of Dreams) with some sort of a J.D. connection.
“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” So said one of literature’s most famous protagonists, Holden Caulfield, in one of the most famously unadapted novels of the 20th century, “The Catcher in the Rye.” A work sought after by producers, directors and actors, including Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo Di Caprio and Jerry Lewis, all intent on making their statement via its famously reclusive author, it’s likely no version of the novel will ever find its way to the big screen. . . . From direct inspiration of story, characters and theme, to quick but telling references, to compelling (or syrupy) speeches, to conspiracy theories, here’s a look at Salinger in cinema. . . .
The films
Igby Goes Down (2002) “Perhaps the most direct inspiration of Holden Caulfield is Igby, the rebellious, cynical and damaged teenager…”
Six Degrees of Separation (1993)
Conspiracy Theory (1997)
The Good Girl (2002) – with passing reference to Jake Gyllenhaal “playing another Caulfield type in Donnie Darko.
Finding Forrester (2000)
The Collector (1965)
The Shining (1980)
Field of Dreams (1989)
Taxi Driver (1976) Travis Bickle as “the incarnation of the future Holden Caulfield.”
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) “From his angry, alienated youth in revolt Max Fischer of Rushmore to the poignantly unhappy, yet beautifully eccentric Tenenbaum family, Wes Anderson might be the closest cinematic heir to J.D. Salinger, both aesthetically and thematically.”
Criterion tweeted this New Yorker article, which seems to suggest that Salinger liked movies. It’s in the second last paragraph. Guess we have to be careful not to confuse an author with their characters.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/02/08/100208ta_talk_ross#ixzz0eUipX30E
Still, a nice retrospective of Salinger’s place in the movies themselves, Ron.
You should add Chasing Holden to the list.
Good call, Anders.
Reading the Salinger tributes in the February 8 New Yorker, you’d swear Holden Caulfield was J.D. Salinger, with his suspicion of prestige, his antipathy toward school, his allergy to “phoniness”;
Salinger: “I think I despise every school and college in the world, but the ones with the best reputation first.” . . . Salinger was generous with writers he admired, but he was unsparing about those who had what he called “disguises.” . . . “It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. . . . Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more.”
Lillian Ross, “Bearable”
Given that apparent closeness between author and creation, Holden’s outspoken anti-movie sentiments seem almost a wry joke against the context of Salingers’ own affection for the cinema;
“Salinger loved movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen Grand Illusion ten times.) Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accommodate her pour le sport.”
Lillian Ross, “Bearable”
“After a while, Jerry came out and went to the back of the room, where he kept, on shelves, a collection of old 16-mm. films, the kind where you have to change the reel threee or four times in the course of the movie. An old-fashioned projector had been set up behind the sofa. He ran through some titles; we settled on Sergeant York. Jerry threaded the film through the projector, and then he turned the lights off and remained behind us, his face illuminated by the flickering projector. The movie was captioned, perhaps because he was going a little deaf. Toward the end, he seemed to get choked up.”
John Seabrook, “A Night At The Movies”
As if to say, “Just in case you think this Caulfield boy is me, think again.”