Mailer's movies
Source: Irish Independent (Original Article)
If you look up Norman Mailer on YouTube, among the many delights on offer is a clip entitled Norman Mailer vs Rip Torn. In an extraordinary piece of footage, the Pulitzer-prize-winning author and the iconic 60s actor engage in a protracted and vicious brawl involving ear-biting, attempted strangulation and a hammer. It’s actually the culminating scene of one of Mailer’s experimental films, Maidstone, but the combat looks in deadly earnest. Apparently, it was.
Mailer, who died on November 10 last, was a force of nature, a prolific and magnificently wayward talent whose failures were almost as interesting as his successes. Though he achieved early and lavish acclaim with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was a terminally restless soul and, instead of settling into the respectable literary life that seemed to have been marked out for him, would dabble throughout his life in politics, journalism, the theatre and film.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, Mailer had fallen in love with the cinema, especially the Warner Brothers gangster classics starring the likes of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Pat O’Brien. As a teenager his interests expanded into European arthouse, and he would remain besotted by film for the rest of his days. He had always nourished fantasies of being a filmmaker, and one of the first things he did with his royalty cheque for The Naked and the Dead in the late 1940s was make a ten-minute silent film about a girl having an abortion. There may have been marketing difficulties with that one.
In the summer of 1948, Mailer went to Hollywood. There was interest in the rights to his novel, and he enjoyed meeting Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart and Charlie Chaplin. Perhaps he imagined some role for himself in the Hollywood system, but he hated the political atmosphere (it was the height of the communist witchhunts) and was too much of a maverick in any case to fit in MEDIUM dvd anywhere for very long.
He left …continue reading