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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Owen and Kidman as Hemingway and Gellhorn

May 21, 2012 by Scott Timberg

SOMETIMES, in this business, you have to do things you don’t want to do — deal with unpleasant people, write about a production that bores you to tears. Other times, you get to talk to Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman about Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, the strong-willed war correspondent who would hate to be remembered at Papa’s third wife.

Later this month, HBO will broadcast a film, Hemingway & Gellhorn, about the two writers and their ferocious love affair against the background of the churn of world politics. Here is my story, for which I interviewed the two actors as well as Philip Kaufman, director of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

“There was this five-, six-year tussle with her,” Kaufman told me. “It’s a very mythical kind of relationship they had: She’s a Hemingway heroine. The problem being: Is that what he really wanted in real life?”

I expected Kaufman and Owen (whose Children of Men is one of my favorite movies) to be intelligent and articulate. But Kidman really impressed me — she had more depth, seriousness, and curiosity to her than I would have guessed. It’s the business of an actor to be likable, unpretentious, etc — but you can’t fake smarts.

In any case, be curious what my readers make of the film, which uses a number of different film stocks to recreate the feel of several different eras.

Filed Under: books, film, literary, television

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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