Movie Excitement

"CANNES, France (AP) — Tom Ford's second film has been acquired by Focus Features in the biggest sale yet at Cannes.
Focus announced Sunday that it has acquired the worldwide rights to Ford's upcoming thriller "Nocturnal Animals," with Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal to star. The film marks the second film for the fashion designer following the 2009 drama "Single Man," with Colin Firth.
After Ford pitched the film to buyers during the festival, it became one of the hottest properties on the market. It sold for about $20 million, making it easily the festival's biggest purchase.
Ford will write, direct and produce the film, which is based on Austin Wright's novel "Tony and Susan." Focus chief executive Peter Schlessel called it a "romantic tale of revenge and regret." It's about an art gallery owner haunted by her ex-husband's novel." Seattlepi

The Forceful Suppression of Childhood Affections

(the following is excerpted from AMW's unfinished autobiography of himself as a writer. It is an account of his undergraduate experience at Harvard)

Austerity. The choice of geology was not the only austerity I had to face in my college career. I encountered more when my friends tried to cure me of my obsessions with the Fall River Line and the New Haven Railroad. I had a framed picture of the Priscilla over my desk. I went down to South Station with my notebook to observe operations, record engine numbers, and take pictures. My friends (led by Pres) decided it was childish. I needed to be made forcefully to grow up, to be educated.

They launched what to me seemed like a military campaign, an assault upon what I regarded as private territory in my private mind. This was worst during the spring of my freshman year, and I fought back bitterly. They criticized and ridiculed my notebooks and pictures. My resistance stimulated fiercer attacks, which came to a head when they took my pictures and notebooks and secreted them away. There was even a fight as I tried to rescue my things, and I remember pounding Bill on his back with my fists. I also remember Pres coming to me afterwards with a smile and saying, "No hard feelings?"

Somehow the assault did no harm to our friendships. We continued to go to meals and classes together and continued to talk about things. We chose to go as a foursome into Leverett the next year, and we discussed our majors. The battle was separate from that.
Eventually they returned the pictures and the notebook, but I had to learn the lesson they were teaching. It amounted to a surrender. To some extent the surrender was fake: I merely took my interests underground, as evidenced by the way they re-emerged years later. But it was only partly fake. The interesting thing is the extent to which I taught myself to accept the lesson they were teaching and train myself in the austerity it required.

The lesson was simply that my boats and trains were the residue of childhood I should have outgrown. There was no place for that sort of thing in the life of a college student coming into the world. The Fall River Line, which had been a romantic symbol of the dying past suddenly became a dead symbol of the childishness of childhood. For Pres it was also a symbol of my eccentricity, which needed to be curbed, disciplined. It symbolized the cast of my mind, my fondness for classifying and listing, which for Pres was insufficiently humanistic.

They won. It was hard while it lasted, but by the end of my freshman year I had outgrown all my old interests. I abandoned the Fall River Line. I gave up my collection of engine numbers. I stopped going to South Station. I actually believed I had achieved these things. I agreed with Pres. I no longer thought his attitude arrogant and presumptuous. It was, as he frequently told me, for my own good. I developed a new attitude about what was worthy of attention, and the values of stringency and discipline. I recognized the seductive and destructive allure of the familiar and comfortable.

I had certain private interests which I did not abandon, though I innerly knew they not much different from those I did. I kept them largely because my friends were not advanced enough to judge them. My interest in Wagnerian opera, for example, which had an extraneous symbolism like the Fall River Line, quite apart from the qualities of the music. The austerity ban reached to this only some years later.

Eventually I outgrew austerity. I rescued the Fall River Line and the New Haven Railroad and the Wagnerian Opera. This did not happen for at least twenty years though.

Books Within Books: Resurrecting Wright The Second Pass

NEW:  Essays from AMW's files.
TRAIN WATCHING AT WEST FALMOUTH

When I was child in the 1920’s and 1930’s I went every summer to my grandmother’s house in West Falmouth on Cape Cod. We left New York by the Fall River Line and completed the journey by car or by train depending on whether we had a car that year or not. One of my great pleasures in those summers was watching the trains on the single track branch line of the New Haven that stopped at West Falmouth on its way to Woods Hole from Boston. It was an ideal small time railroad operation with stations three to four miles apart and just enough trains to make it interesting.

The place was wonderful for a child’s vacation: the beach, the house in the woods, the pretty village, the exciting larger villages of Falmouth and Woods Hole not far off. But the focus of my pleasure was the trains.

From the Chicago Tribune

'Tony and Susan' by Austin Wright

This week's editors choice is 'Tony and Susan' by Austin Wright

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"Tony and Susan" by Austin Wright

August 24, 2011|By Elizabeth Taylor | Literary editor

Tony & Susan Travels the World!

Coming out soon in Czech!

 That makes 15 languages now.

On Amazon's website, I just discovered that Tony and Susan is mentioned in note 22 in the "Back Matter" in The Essential Wayne Booth.