Thanks to BookBub for selecting My Year as a Clown as the feature of the day this week.
Boats Against the Current Closing in on the Finish Line
We’re very close to wrapping up shooting, three years in the making! Who would have imagined that this project would go on that long. With much still to be done before we can truly call it a wrap, we now have a 90-minute rough cut that we’re extremely excited about.
Next week we head up to Vermont for the last road trip.
Deej and I hosting Profosser Kirk Curnutt from Alabama, with Prof Goldleaf from Pace. Walter, also from Pace, took the photograph.
… Read the restWater Is . . . Music by Chris & Tina of Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club. Video Written & Edited by RSW.
I wrote this for the Paul Newman Charity Safe Water Network. Chris and Tina did an amazing job with the music!
And it was reviewed by this blogger the first day:… Read the rest
Boats Against the Current Nearing Completion: Finally!
Inspired by a 1996 New Yorker article by the esteemed Westport writer, Barbra Probst Solomon, who first connected the Gatsby dots to Westport, Deej Webb and myself picked up Barbara’s baton because her piece was ignored by the Fitzgerald scholars. Besides writing numerous books and essays, Barbara had also started a literary magazine with her good friends Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, and yet nobody bit on her thesis.
Sam Waterston played Nick Carraway in the ’74 Gatsby, and he plays a person interested in literary history in our film: Boats Against the Current.
We interviewed more than a dozen scholars, dug into the archives at Princeton, made a presentation at a Fitzgerald Society Conference in Montgomery, Alabama. We even journeyed up to Burlington Vermont when it hit 18 degrees below zero to film one of Fitzgerald’s granddaughters, who incidentally, rarely speaks to anyone
What we uncovered was not only surprising, it made us realize that the Westport Fitzgerald home was much more than just about Gatsby, which let’s face it, should suffice for any literary buff (come to the event to learn more).
But the narrative isn’t just about what happened here in 1920, it’s about what’s happening today. … Read the rest