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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Upward and downward with the arts

February 4, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I’m a sucker for stories of Arrival like this one (via Elegant Variation) about novelist Andrew Sean Greer getting the Updike/New Yorker stamp of approval for his new third book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli (the novel is also Antic-Muse-approved [see right column]). They’re already chattering about his juvenilia:

His first novel, written at 16, was a “Wuthering Heights” knockoff that he entered in a young adult novel competition. He lost: “I had never heard of ‘young adult novels,’ which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.”

My old favorite story of this kind is the one about Jeff Maguire, who wrote the screenplay for the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire. Maguire was on the verge of moving his penniless family from Los Angeles back to New Hampshire when he got word that Clint Eastwood had bought his script. And I do mean penniless–just to be able to afford to go out to dinner and celebrate the sale, he and his wife had to take back to the store a blouse he had recently given her for her birthday.


But oh dear, it seems that Maguire’s sum output since that shining moment consists of a bonus feature for the In the Line of Fire DVD (appearing “as himself”) and the one movie whose trailer provided me with perhaps the most memorable pre-feature hilarity all last year, delivering such textbook Hollywood brain-drain as:

At a remote archaeological site in the French countryside…


“Your father wrote that…but he wrote it six hundred years ago!”


“…fax machine that would actually fax three-dimensional objects…”


“We found my father’s documents and glasses–are you trying to tell me he faxed them back to the fourteenth century?”
“No. Your father is in the fourteenth century.”

Glad that’s cleared up! Textbook, I tell you.


To be fair, screenwriter Maguire had what I’m sure was the indispensable help of a Michael Crichton novel in coming up with this stuff. Still, let’s hope Mr. Greer evades this sort of plunge (I’m not too worried).

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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