Pages tagged “tom wolfe”

Tom Wolfe's 2005 novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Picador), about an innocent country girl facing the comparative social wilds of an American college, will get its chance to shock theater audiences when music video director Liz Friedlander takes all its scandalous content to full-length feature format next year. The last book the newspaper reporter-turned-bestselling author optioned for film was 1987's The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Freidlander's previous directorial credits include episodes of One Tree Hill, 2006's Antonio Banderas-led Take The Lead and a segment in Blink 182: Greatest Hits, as well as music videos for the likes of U2.

John Watson, screenwriter for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is slated to adapt Charlotte for the screen, /Film reports.

Because of Wolfe's trademark style of dress (see above), the director's resume, and the screenwriter's history of working on (gasp) a Kevin Costner film, the bloggerati have already started to make fun. But we're going to wait to pass judgement when we actually see the thing.

Related links:
TomWolfe.com
Amazon.com: I Am Charlotte Simmons
EW.com: Movie Review: The Bonfire of the Vanities

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Vrooooom! VROOOOOOOOM! Tom Wolfe’s BAAAACK!!! Publicationally speaking, the reissue this month of two titles (The Right Stuff, 1979, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987) by alpha male New Journalist Tom Wolfe might seem a tad staged. Just what is expected here? Where comes this signal to admire with even more admirable admiration one of our most admired writers? Do we newly face Wolfe—ward, and genuflect? Is this when we all agree to gratefully shell out our shekels to keep Wolfe off welfare? Reissues work best when they dig up the dead and show us the beautiful bones. Think literary archeology. But look here—Tom Wolfe’s still alive, still resplendent in mind and couture, his suit the whitest, his shoes ever-shined and ready at the drop of a pen to dance on the grave of his lit-bitch rival John Updike. (That is, should Wolfe outlast the old “penis with a thesaurus.” This rather gratuitous shot at Updike comes courtesy of David Foster Wallace, who included the quote in his book Consider The Lobster. Wallace attributes the calumny to an unnamed female with—obviously—no high opinion of Mr. U.) Wolfe needs no thesaurus. He writes in a brilliantly inventive and invective style, making up language when he needs it, deliciously blending reporting and observation and sweet English like the morning crew at Smoothie King. Wolfe towers over every other New Journalist, his books spot-owning the zeitgeist of the 1960s (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968); the 1970s (Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, 1976); and the 1980s (Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987). The Right StuΩ, his nonfiction work of greatest fame, gave a fresh phrase to the English language and a fresh set of heroes—America’s test pilots and astronauts—to our culture. These Wolfe reissues, by Picador, no doubt target Gen Y and Z and zzzz folk who may know phrases like “the right stuff” and “masters of the universe” from an iPod or video game somewhere but do not yet appreciate their creator. There’s some risk with this new audience. What if Wolfe’s works now seem—horrors—dated? That’s especially a gamble with Bonfire, a chronicle of the career meltdown of a young high-rolling Wall Street analyst in a boom-and-doom 1980s NYC. Will Bonfire hold up? Is New York still such a witches’ brew of racial and social and class conflict? Has the rest of America been unyoked from New York enough by now to care? Perversely, if there’s one bit of good news in 2007’s sub prime lending fiasco, it might be for Wolfe’s reissue. Bonfire can only benefit from the reminder that when one falls from grace in the concrete canyonlands of Manhattan, it’s often from a very great height.