Gone South

To the Hellman Wyler Festival, where they're celebrating Lillian Hellman's plays and William Wyler's Hollywood film versions.

South means Birmingham, Alabama, and the town of Demopolis in Marengo County not far from there.

Why there? If you ever saw "The Little Foxes" you'd know. Hellman, who was born in New Orleans, based the scheming Hubbard clan in "Foxes" on her mother's family, which came from Demopolis.

The festival will be staging "The Little Foxes" and screening the film, along with three other Wyler-Hellman pairings: "These Three" (based on her first play "The Children's Hour"), "The Children's Hour" (a remake more faithful to the play), and "Dead End" (based on a Sidney Kingsley play that Hellman adapted).

As a Wyler biographer, I've been invited to take part in panel discussions with Deborah Martinson, Hellman's latest biographer, and many other invited guests.

Back next week.

Postscript: March 2 -- I've returned home with several trophies. This one was bagged in the Demopolis town square.

The festival continues in Birmingham through Sunday.

February 28, 2007 3:26 PM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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