Miscellaneous: Quotes of Note

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK – I know there’s supposed to be a period at the end of the title, but dammit, it just looks wrong – has already taken home best actor and best screenplay honors from the Venice Film Festival. In the October 2005 issue of Premiere magazine, director/co-writer George Clooney describes the rehearsal process:

“(The cast) would come in and type out the news of the day on a typewriter. And (David Strathairn) would sit there and read it; just every morning, he would come in and read some of the news. We were watching, going, this is today’s news read by Edward R. Murrow. Oh my God. How different it sounds.”

I can only hope that Clooney rolled film while this was happening, and that some of this footage will be included on the DVD.

In the New York Times Book Review, Joe Queenan offers a surprisingly positive review of FAN-TAN, the film treatment-turned-novel by Marlon Brando and director Donald Cammell:

“... it sounds like the boys had a heap of fun cranking out this page turner while throwing back a few hundred martinis. There’s a lot to be said for this approach; if you can’t write a great novel, at least write a peculiar one and have a few laughs along the way.”

I particularly liked Queenan’s take on contemporary fiction:

“FAN-TAN is the kind of high-seas extravaganza nobody writes anymore because everybody’s too busy churning out books about land-based serial killers, perhaps concealing the Spear of Longinus beneath the Shroud of Turin in the glove compartment of a Dodge Neon that once belonged to Mary Magdalene’s luckless descendant, Rhiannon Schwartz.”

He also compares the book to the Kevin Spacey movie BEYOND THE SEA, so I pretty much have to read it.