Geoff Rodkey: Lights Out in Lincolnwood (A Novel)

Lights Out in Lincolnwood – A Novel – Geoff Rodkey – HarperCollins – 9780063065925 – Paperback – 544 pages – $16.99 – ebook versions available at lower prices

I have to admit that I did not expect to really like this book anywhere near as much as I did. I’ve certainly read my share of suburban based stories that wittily poke fun at modern life. But Geoff Rodkey surprised me with Lights Out in Lincolnwood and I found myself reading it every day in big chunks – the kind of book that is dangerous to my sleep as I can’t stop reading. Like eating dried fruit. Except that I did not regret it later.

Today’s world seems to encourage writers to imagine the worst about our future – this book does that for sure. But Rodkey keeps us from getting depressed with humor, even as he tells us the truth about ourselves and our illusions we like to carry around about how we would act under pressure.

And there is not much more pressure one can imagine than the story Rodkey tells here, as an unexplained collapse of our infrastructure suddenly happens. By focusing on a single family and its community, Rodkey is able to bring the whole story down to a practical level, as his characters, whom we readily recognize, go through an almost Marxian (that’s Marx Brothers by the way) experience that readers can’t help laugh at and simultaneously shudder about. It is frighteningly close to home.

How do we survive calamity when we have no idea how to do anything that is needed to survive and the tools we need don’t work and the neighbors we thought we knew turn into completely different people – or maybe reveal themselves for whom they really are, at last.

The entire book takes place during an action packed and tension filled four days – chaos, change, fear, hysteria, and perhaps even joy mark the struggle of the Altman family as they try to determine how to live in a world without technology. They struggle with getting food and water, their modern past-times and addictions, neighbors who become militaristic and brutal, and the town’s looting of the local Whole Foods is the least of the craziness they have to contend with as they try to figure out just what is going on and how they will manage to get through a worldwide catastrophe.

It’s impossible to not be captivated by this book. It was fun to read and to talk to Geoff, and I know it made a difference as its story line and characters have stayed with me long after I finished reading the book. We had a terrific time talking for Writerscast about this book and Geoff’s work as a writer in various media.

Geoff Rodkey is the New York Times best-selling author of ten children’s books, including the Tapper Twins and Chronicles of Egg series; We’re Not From Here; and Marcus Makes a Movie, a collaboration with actor Kevin Hart. He’s also the Emmy-nominated screenwriter of Daddy Day Care and RV, among other films. Geoff lives in New York City with his family.

In particular, We’re Not From Here, A sci-fi comedy for middle grade readers about a family of humans who immigrate to an alien planet after Earth is destroyed (written for middle grade readers) looks like another fun Rodkey story.

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

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The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics by Sydney Ladensohn Stern

The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics – Sydney Ladensohn Stern- 9781617032677 – University Press of Mississippi – 480 pages – 88 b&w illustrations – October 2019 – Hardcover – $35 – ebook version available at lower prices

There are any number of characters and influencers in the history of modern American film-making, but among the many greats who contributed to its evolution into the dominant form of our popular culture, the Mankiewicz brothers stand out. Between them, they played critical roles in an incredible array of films that comprise our film canon today. Herman (1897–1953) and Joe (1909–1993) either wrote, produced, or directed (sometimes both or all) more than 150 films, from late era silents to almost modern era big budget productions.

Herman is credited with writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles (though the amount of work done by each of them has long been disputed) and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe won four Oscars altogether, including two for writing and directing All About Eve, which also was awarded Best Picture in 1950.

Both the older Herman and the much younger Joe started as writers and then became successful as producers and in Joe’s case as a director as well. They came to Hollywood as upwardly mobile children of immigrants, brilliant intellectually and wildly witty, and feeling extremely ambiguous throughout their careers about the value and importance of their work in film – concerned it seems, to not be recognized as serious artists, as their novelist and playwright friends had been. The conflict between art and popular culture defined their lives and caused them each great suffering.

Herman was an early member of the renowned Algonquin Round Table group of wits, and in his unhappiness and self destructiveness, frequently lost all his money gambling. He alienated all the major film studios, and was dead by the age of 55. At the same time that Herman was ruining his career, Joe found significant success as writer, producer, and director, although he was almost addicted to deeply felt romances with the stars he worked with, including Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford, causing terrible suffering to his wife and family.

Biographer Sydney Ladensohn Stern spent ten years in researching and writing this comprehensive portrait of twentieth century American film through the lens of two of its most important and compelling figures. She’s written a thorough and highly readable narrative that gives us a chance to understand the complexities of her characters, and for anyone with an interest in modern film history, this book will be irresistible. The Mankiewicz brothers are among the titans upon which the movie business was built – their writing helped to define the language we see now as emblematic of an entire era in American history. This was a very fun book for me to read and I very much enjoyed talking to Sydney about her book. I think you will enjoy hearing our conversation and you should read this book (now available as an audiobook too).

“one of the best of the recent biographies of screenwriters … One thing I love about her book are the footnotes that trace the lineage of some of the great Mank stories (“The white wine came up with the fish” and “Imagine that, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass”…) ” –Tom Stempel

Sydney Ladensohn Stern worked as a reporter for Fortune and Money magazines and as an editor and award-winning columnist for the Scarsdale Inquirer before she started freelance writing. Her column, “Suburban Exposure,” covered politics and contemporary culture as well as her family and community, but she discontinued it after her sons left home and stopped providing her with material. She has freelanced for numerous publications including the New York Times. Her first biography is Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique.

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

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Adina Hoffman: Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures – Adina Hoffman – 9780300180428 – Yale University Press – Hardcover – 264 pages – $26 – February 12, 2019 – ebook versions available at lower prices

I grew up in a family where the movie business was in our blood, and part of the conversations of everyday life, so I have long known about – and appreciated – the amazing screen writing of Ben Hecht. Hecht’s many screenplays in many ways established and defined what is now standard movie practice. He wrote some of the greatest and most watched films in history, and made a well paid career out of “doctoring” other writers’ scripts. Hollywood was his reluctant artistic base for many years, though he would never be completely comfortable there.

Reading this very comprehensive, but highly readable biography by Adina Hoffman, brought Hecht’s life and work into focus for me for the first time. Hecht’s story was that of a classic 20th century second generation Jewish immigrant. He was raised in Wisconsin, made his way to Chicago, became a newspaper writer and then a novelist in the glory years after World War I, where he helped create and define the literary scene in that great city, before moving to New York, where he truly established himself as literary star.

Hecht and Charles MacArthur together wrote the now-classic play, The Front Page, becoming writing partners and pals for many years thereafter. Some of Hecht’s most famous screenplays include Scarface, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Notorious and His Girl Friday. Hecht worked on literally hundreds of films, was a powerful enough writer to be able to be given the opportunity to produce four films with MacArthur (a mis-adventure described wonderfully by Hoffman). Hecht worked with some of the greatest directors, producers and actors in 20th century film. His work literally defined what a Hollywood movie could be, and much of what we think about 20th century American culture is derived from his cynical, yet optimistic worldview.

Hecht’s many novels and nonfiction books are not widely read or known today, and according to Hoffman, who has read them all, some are lost to literary history for good reason. Still, it is quite possible that this fully formed biography with its clear eyed evaluation of Hecht as passionate human, brilliant intellect and outstanding writer, will help their cause. For myself, I have made a commitment to read at least one or two of the books that Hoffman tells us are important enough to seek out, including at least one novel. I have thought about reading Hecht’s very early novel Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, even though Hoffman pretty much dismisses it, except for one great sentence that is said to have inspired Ginsberg’s Howl. But it is his autobiography, A Child of the Century that calls out to me the most, and that I will be reading soon.

Though he was decidedly a non-secular Jew during World War II, Hecht rediscovered his Jewish identity and became a powerful public voice pressuring American politicians to save the Jews of Europe. After the war, Hecht’s Zionism led him to support the nascent Jewish state of Israel with the burning fervor of a convert, his trademark enthusiasm focused on building a safe haven for Jews, which ironically, he never visited. Hecht, as Hoffman shows us, was a complicated human being – and frequently an unforgivable one as well.

Ben Hecht was emblematic as the “child of the [20th] century” who helped to define modern Jewish America and modern popular culture. Adina Hoffman is a terrific writer and a gifted storyteller, perfectly suited to tell this story. Thanks to Yale University Press for creating an absolutely beautiful book, one that serves her writing well, and makes reading it a better experience.

Adina Hoffman is an essayist and biographer who splits her time between New Haven and Jerusalem. Fortunately, she was in New Haven when I wanted to talk to her about this book and the work that went into it. Hoffman is the author of four books, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. She was a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post, and was a founder and editor of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of the literature of the Levant. She has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, and NYU, and was notably one of the inaugural (2013) winners of the Windham Campbell prize. Read more about Adina and Ibis Editions here.

And you can find a good bibliographical of Hecht’s work here.

Note to listeners, this interview was recording live in a room with a bit of echo, so apologies to all for the sound quality.

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Margaret Talbot: The Entertainer

The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century – 978-1594631887 – Riverhead Books – Paperback – $18.00 (ebook versions available at lower prices) – published November 5, 2013

Margaret Talbot was the youngest child in the last marriage of actor Lyle Talbot, so when she was growing up in 1950s and 1960s Los Angeles, her father, as a much older man, was a direct link to a much earlier period of American show business.  Lyle was born in Nebraska in 1902, and left his small home town as soon as he could – in 1916 he joined a traveling carnival.  From there he went on to an almost emblematic life, acting in traveling theater groups and  getting to Hollywood just in time for the talkies.  Handsome and debonair, he was a solid actor in some major Warner Brothers pictures with stars like Humphrey Bogart and Carole Lombard.  Later he appeared steadily in B-pictures and has some renown for being the lead in the now famous (but infinitely terrible) Ed Wood made Plan 9 from Outer Space, and as many other former film actors did, he ultimately became a fixture on television, including the recurring role of Joe Randolph on the long-running Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

A respected writer for the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot does much more than just telling the story of her father’s life.  The Entertainer is a loving biography of Lyle, but it is also a cultural history of modern American show business told from the inside.  And because Talbot is a sharp observer and an experienced journalist – as well as a loving daughter –  she is able to see both her father and the world he lived in and through with both clarity and appreciation.  And she is a really good writer too.

Some relatively few individuals have had the great good fortune to find their way into this part of the culture; whatever their roles, actors, stagehands, directors, camera operators, it was and still is a business, a lifestyle, and a world that was both magical and mundane, real and made up.  For all who were and have been in the film and television industry in whatever roles, the magic is real, and many of them, if not all, could be imagined as the “lucky ones” who get to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist that so many aspire to but never directly experience.  While Lyle Talbot never achieved stardom, he was a deservedly working actor in Hollywood for almost sixty years. Now his daughter has placed him at the center of a story both brilliantly and beautifully told, allowing us to understand the era in which he lived and worked.

I enjoyed this book as a work of cultural history well told, and it was also special for me because my own grandfather, like Lyle Talbot in love with theater and the movies, worked for Warner Brothers from the late 1920s into the early 1950s, and then my father worked in television and film for almost sixty years, so Margaret’s experiences as a child of show business were especially resonant for me, and having the opportunity to speak with her was great fun.

The Entertainer amplifies the story of 20th century Hollywood for any of us who still believe in its magic.  Visit the author’s website where there is more about the book and her work.

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Lois Banner: Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox

978-1608195312 – Bloomsbury USA – Hardcover – $30.00 (ebook editions available, prices vary)

Marilyn Monroe was one of the great icons of mid-century America.  I grew up while she was in her prime in the late fifties and the early sixties, and the power of her image and beauty was available even to me as a pre-pubescent youth.  Her cultural appeal was remarkable.  But the complexity of her persona was equally powerful, and certainly enabled her incredible charisma and appeal.

Her marriages to the equally iconic Joe DiMaggio and the brilliant playwright Arthur Miller, and rumors of her romantic liaisons to many other well known public figures added to the mythological elements of her story.  And her undeniable skill as a comic actress and amazing on screen sexuality were unmatched by any other actor of her time.  That she died relatively young, and in mysterious and controversial circumstances only added to the ongoing fascination with her life that continues a half century later.

Marilyn biographies (and exploitive tell-alls) abound.  But no biographer has done what feminist scholar Lois Banner has done in Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.  This is a complex and in-depth examination of a complex and challenging subject.  Through exhaustive research and access to previously unavailable sources, Banner tells the story of Marilyn’s life in incredible (and never boring) detail, begins=ning at the outset of Marilyn’s difficult life and through to her sad and tragic death at age 36.  We learn a tremendous amount about Marilyn, as a person, an actress, a thoughtful and well read intellectual, a star with a created narrative, a lover of men and of women, and in many ways a proto-feminist figure.

Reading this book, I found myself thinking about the distinctions in human nature that enables some of us to use personal challenges to grow and to create ourselves into powerful beings, while others simply suffer.  But most of all, the sheer loneliness and pain of being that beset Marilyn are overwhelming to contemplate.  Reading Banner’s recounting of her final weeks and days is an incredibly painful experience.  And it was eye-opening for me to understand that the circumstances of her death are likely not as most of us have believed, a suicide.

This is really a powerful story, and one that I recommend to readers who may not have felt themselves interested in the details of Marilyn Monroe’s life.  This is a serious biography about a serious and important life, and one that is well deserving of the powerful telling Banner has given to Marilyn.  You can learn more at the author’s website. I really enjoyed talking to Ms. Banner and wished we had more time available to talk together about this book.

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