While Jeff Whitty would write the first four drafts of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, summoning a screenplay from a memoir, he wasn’t anticipating the assignment. A Tony Award winner known at that point for Avenue Q—a raunchy and witty puppet musical, which has had a long run, on and off Broadway—the aptly named Whitty was initially approached by producer Bob Balaban, to write up the hilarious and poignant true story of American author (and accomplished literary forger) Lee Israel. “Bob had read a play of mine called The Hiding Place, where I wrote about my friends in New York who were artists. Some of them had Lee’s voice, that thing of being kind of fussy—not fussy in a bad way, but looking for integrity in everything,” the writer recalls. “So, I was hired, and it was kind of eerie because I knew Julius’ incredibly well,...
- 1/12/2019
- by Matt Grobar
- Deadline Film + TV
Award-winning actor renowned for her work on Broadway and roles in classic films such as East of Eden and The Haunting
Unable to make sufficient money from her novels, the great American writer Carson McCullers took advice from Tennessee Williams and allowed one of her masterpieces to be adapted for the theatre. The resultant success of The Member of the Wedding (1950) widened her fame, and made a Broadway star of Julie Harris, who has died aged 87.
The play's main character is Frankie Addams, a gawky 12-year-old who longs for companionship and the "we of me". Although the second juvenile role, in what is essentially a three-hander, went to a child actor, Brandon de Wilde, the complex part of Frankie fell to Harris, who was then 24. Born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and trained at the Yale School of Drama, Harris had made her Broadway debut in It's a Gift in...
Unable to make sufficient money from her novels, the great American writer Carson McCullers took advice from Tennessee Williams and allowed one of her masterpieces to be adapted for the theatre. The resultant success of The Member of the Wedding (1950) widened her fame, and made a Broadway star of Julie Harris, who has died aged 87.
The play's main character is Frankie Addams, a gawky 12-year-old who longs for companionship and the "we of me". Although the second juvenile role, in what is essentially a three-hander, went to a child actor, Brandon de Wilde, the complex part of Frankie fell to Harris, who was then 24. Born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and trained at the Yale School of Drama, Harris had made her Broadway debut in It's a Gift in...
- 8/25/2013
- by Brian Baxter
- The Guardian - Film News
The Josef Fritzl affair and similar cases of horrendous incarceration revealed in its wake have now produced a sizable body of documentaries, feature films and fiction too, of which Michael is a minor, rather puzzling addition. The 40-year-old Austrian film-maker Markus Schleinzer, whose first feature film this is, has worked as a casting director on over 60 films, among them Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and, most significantly, The White Ribbon, on which he coached the child actors.
The eponymous Michael (Michael Fuith) is a 35-year-old minor official with an Austrian insurance company, who keeps the 10-year-old Wolfgang (David Rauchenberger) a prisoner in the soundproofed basement of his suburban home. Michael is a bespectacled, nondescript loner with a brother and sister both married with children. He largely keeps to himself, rejecting the advances of a female colleague, whom he physically throws out of his house when she intrudes.
The eponymous Michael (Michael Fuith) is a 35-year-old minor official with an Austrian insurance company, who keeps the 10-year-old Wolfgang (David Rauchenberger) a prisoner in the soundproofed basement of his suburban home. Michael is a bespectacled, nondescript loner with a brother and sister both married with children. He largely keeps to himself, rejecting the advances of a female colleague, whom he physically throws out of his house when she intrudes.
- 3/4/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Three children are taught to fear the world by their deceitful father in a chiling movie that evokes the Josef Fritzl case
When the cinema began, the public was offered two diametrically opposed experiences. The Lumière brothers recorded exactly what appeared before the camera. Their contemporary, Louis Feuillade, created magical fantasies. It has subsequently alternated between, juggled with and merged the two, just as life itself does for us, with the aid of our parents, spiritual advisers and political leaders. And such things have increasingly been the subject matter of films themselves.
For instance, in Situation Hopeless… But Not Serious (adapted from Robert Shaw's novel The Hiding Place), two Raf aircrew shot down over Germany during the second world war are hidden in a cellar by an apparently benevolent old man who keeps them there as pets, pretending the war has continued into the 1950s. In Hugh Wilson's Blast From the Past,...
When the cinema began, the public was offered two diametrically opposed experiences. The Lumière brothers recorded exactly what appeared before the camera. Their contemporary, Louis Feuillade, created magical fantasies. It has subsequently alternated between, juggled with and merged the two, just as life itself does for us, with the aid of our parents, spiritual advisers and political leaders. And such things have increasingly been the subject matter of films themselves.
For instance, in Situation Hopeless… But Not Serious (adapted from Robert Shaw's novel The Hiding Place), two Raf aircrew shot down over Germany during the second world war are hidden in a cellar by an apparently benevolent old man who keeps them there as pets, pretending the war has continued into the 1950s. In Hugh Wilson's Blast From the Past,...
- 4/26/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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