Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – This just goes to show you that, in these crazy, mixed up times, even a bad movie can inform and entertain.
These days at night, like everybody else, I scroll through the mostly bad movies and shows on streaming services trying to find something worth watching. It’s like an online version of browsing through the selections in a video rental store (I guess they are all out of business now, another business that bit the dust due to the internet).
On Amazon Prime, full of bad old movies and a few good ones, I happened on one called “Genius,” a biographical drama film directed by Michael Grandage and written by John Logan released in 2016, based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg.
It is set in 1929 New York City, but filmed entirely in the UK, and stars Colin Firth as the legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. He is known for “discovering” great authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Jude Law plays the writer Thomas Wolfe from North Carolina.
Nicole Kidman plays Wolfe’s older love interest and wife Aline Bernstein. There are brief appearances by Dominic West as Ernest Hemingway, Guy Pearce as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Laura Linney as Louise Perkins, the editor’s wife.
The film lost money at the box office and was poorly rated by the critics, as you can see on Wikipedia.
But it still drew my interest, mainly due to nostalgia for the Golden Age of American and Southern writing and literature.
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Wolfe’s works should be in the public domain now, although it does not appear anyone has gotten around to publishing them yet as free text or audio books. (A project for Yosemite Radio?)
Those days are long gone. There are no more literary giants like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe. What will we do without them? Watch bad films on streaming services and short videos from A.I. bots?
Read the full column in the New American Journal.