For the first time, yesterday, I saw the DVD cover art of “The End Is Nothing the Road Is All,” a 2015 documentary. I was poking around on my laptop when I came across it by accident. Except for the fact that it showed up on Facebutt, which I try to avoid, it was a nice surprise.
The DVD apparently has a bunch of “extras” on it: a slide show of Algren photos by the Chicago photographer and sculptor Steve Deutch (who was Algren’s closest friend for two decades from the 1960s to the end of Algren’s life in 1981); several bonus videos, including a short film titled “Algren’s Last Night”; interviews with Mark Blottner and Denis Mueller (who made the film with Ilko Davidov); the scholar Brooke Horvath (on Algren’s” political eye”); the Algren biographer Betttina Drew (on his affair with Simone de Beauvoir); and several other “extras.”
It’s too bad there’s no bonus interview with Colin Asher, whose Algren biography Never A Lovely So Real is the most probing, most revealing, and most complete by far — in other words, the best — of the three that have appeared.
