1. It’s great to see R.A. Lafferty mentioned, even if only in passing.
2. Odd that Moskowitz never really describes Stones of Summer though from the brief bits that pop up that might be just as well. Looks like it might be one of those overly literary quasi-autobiographical, slice-o-life tales but then again maybe not. Moskowitz does address this briefly when he notes that his friends couldn’t finish the book though he’s right that in a way it doesn’t matter what the book is in any “objective” sense. My library has a copy of the original 1972 edition so I’ll find out sometime (it’s checked out right now). By the way, the first hardcover, the reprint hardcover and reprint paperback all have slightly different text, supposedly done or approved by Mossman. I have no idea if the first paperback was a simple reprint.
3. I also read nearly all of Alistair Maclean’s novels when I was a kid (probably about 12-14 but almost certainly not much older than that). The Thin Red Line was also a book sale discovery. I picked it up for a quarter and am not sure why I started to read it but discovered it’s one of, if not the, great war novels. It also seemed completely unfilmable though I didn’t know that there had been an earlier movie and a few years later would be a second.
4. The film needed to lose about 20 minutes; you’d think somebody who makes commercials would be a bit more taut. The music is terrible.
5. I know Moskowitz needed to build some kind of suspense and story but really if he’s spending the money to make a movie then why not just hire a private investigator and be done with it? Considering how easy he finds Mossman the PI certainly could have done it very quickly. I also started to become curious how much of the film was actually made at the time of the events. Big chunks are clearly staged so perhaps much of the first quarter to third was done after he realized there was enough material then went back to film it. Of course that’s just a wild guess so don’t anybody come away thinking that’s what happened.
6. It’s a strange feeling to see bits of the literary life as I know it on the screen, from the various publishing aspects to the readers’ sharing of titles. Of course some of these people are the type of overbearing, NPR-listening, “intensity of language” nitwits that I avoid but many of the others are fascinating. There’s an entire film about Robert Gottlieb waiting to be made, maybe even John Seelye.
7. Why all the focus on the hardback publisher when it looks like the paperback was published by Avon? Did he think it so far removed from the author to be unpromising or was that just too much material for the movie?
8. Why are the Mossman segments so brief? Moskowitz seems a bit nonplussed during those scenes so maybe he wasn’t as impressed with Mossman as he had expected. Mossman initially comes off as a kind of blustery small-town intellectual but the more he talks the more interesting he becomes. Moskowitz may be on-screen for more or less two hours but he’s almost a non-entity; Mossman is much more vital and idiosyncratic.
9. Interesting that the focus is on such a narrow conception of literature as being predominantly novels and even those in realistic, psychologically complex conceptions. Mossman is different, talking up Casanova and Twain’s autobiographies among other things. Moskowitz’s shelves seem pruned for maximum impressive impact. He mentions a few science fiction writers and there’s a very brief glimpse of a few SF and mystery paperbacks but does he just read “serious” novels?