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“Ad Astra” director James Gray is giving his take on controversial author Norman Mailer for a new series.

Gray, whose own biographical “Armageddon Time” is a hopeful entry for this year’s Cannes, is set to helm a new TV series about Mailer’s life.

John Buffalo Mailer, the son of the writer (who died in 2007), will produce the project, currently titled “Mailer,” through his Mailer Tuchman Media production company.

Mailer was the author of “The Naked and the Dead,” “The Executioner’s Song,” and “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” among other novels that proved to be cultural touchstones or controversy-stoking tomes — often in the same text. His work reflected on the evolution of Americana, from World War II to the advent of the internet. Mailer’s relationships with fellow literary icons Truman Capote and Gore Vidal will be fodder for the series, as will Mailer’s six wives and numerous mistresses,...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.***As the great studios declined like mammoths sinking into tar pits, the films they produced started bifurcating: there were the stodgy, prestige pictures, like Cleopatra (1963) (which nearly sank Fox into the bitumen altogether), and there were trashy low-budget affairs farmed out to bottom-feeding indie producers, the sixties equivalent of the B pictures of yore. These were often more enjoyable than the respectable productions, even when they really were trash.Lauren Bacall counted Shock Treatment (1964) as the worst film of her career, and apart from her tendency to underrate Written on the Wind (1956), she had pretty sound judgement. Director Denis Sanders was among the first film school graduates to make films...

Nicolás Zukerfeld’s There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways Of Showing A Man Getting On A Horse (No Existen Treinta Y Seis Maneras De Mostrar Cómo Un Hombre Se Sube A Un Caballo), his tribute to Raoul Walsh, co-written and expertly edited with Malena Solarz, is a highlight of the Currents program in the 58th New York Film Festival.

The 1924 Douglas Fairbanks adventure The Thief of Bagdad; the 1933 musical Going Hollywood with Bing Crosby; Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland and James Cagney in the 1890s stage world of Strawberry Blonde (1941); the 1958 Norman Mailer adaptation The Naked And The Dead; the 1960s Biblical drama Esther And The King, with Joan Collins in the title role - it isn’t easy to pick only one Raoul...

Exclusive: John Buffalo Mailer, son of the iconic author Norman Mailer, is partnering with Hivemind, Washington Place Productions and Mailer-Tuchman Media to create a limited series based on his father’s novel The Naked and the Dead. The deal was brokered by UTA. The partnership is packaging the project and seeking a top showrunner.

Hailed as the first novel to come out of World War II, the critically acclaimed epic enjoyed 62 consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Seller. The Naked and the Dead was based on Norman Mailer’s experiences during WWII. The story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. It was adapted into a film in 1958 which was directed by Raoul Walsh, but the TV adaptation will be an opportunity to put the story on a larger canvas.

“Nearly 20 ago my father entrusted the adaptation of ‘he Naked And The Dead to me,...

Exclusive: Mailer Tuchman Media has launched with an initial slate of film and TV projects anchored by Mailer, a drama series about the late author/provocateur.

Mailer’s son, John Buffalo Mailer, is creative director of Mtm, which is both producing and financing. Joining him are Martin Tuchman, the company’s executive producer, and Jennifer Gelfer, executive director.

Mailer is a screenwriter, journalist, playwright, actor, producer and Norman Mailer’s youngest child. His work includes writing and acting in 2017 film Blind, and acting in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Second Sun.

Tuchman is an entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. He is chairman and CEO of The Tuchman Group, a firm with holdings in real estate, banking and international shipping. Gelfer is a director, producer and actor whose credits include In Between Men, Showing Roots, Blind and The Second Sun, which was her feature directing debut.

Mailer is based on J. Michael Lennon’s biography,...

One of the splashier WW2 combat sagas adapts Norman Mailer’s respected book but ends up a bona fide mess. Aldo Ray, Cliff Robertson and Raymond Massey flail about in a compromised screen story, augmented with side-dish appearances by sultry Barbara Nichols and — even though she’s allowed to contribute almost nothing — famous ecdysiast Lili St. Cyr. Let the search for outtakes begin.

The Naked and the Dead

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 131 min. / Street Date August 28, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Aldo Ray, Cliff Robertson, Raymond Massey, Lili St. Cyr, Barbara Nichols, William Campbell, Richard Jaeckel, James Best, Joey Bishop, Jerry Paris, Robert Gist, L.Q. Jones, Max Showalter, John Beradino, Saundra Edwards, Lydia Goya, Val Hidey, Taffy O’Neil, Liz Renay, Grace Lee Whitney.

Cinematography: Joseph Lashelle

Film Editor: Arthur P. Schmidt

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

Written by Denis Sanders & Terry Sanders from the novel by Norman...

This post originally appeared on Entertainment Weekly.

Whether he’s reading to kids at the White House, hitting up local bookstores on Black Friday, or giving recommendations to his daughters, President Barack Obama may as well be known as the Commander in Books.

Potus is an avid reader and recently spoke to the New York Times about the significant, informative and inspirational role literature has played in his presidency, crediting books for allowing him to “slow down and get perspective.” With his presidency coming to an end this Friday, EW looked back at Obama’s lit picks over the years...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

“Fassbinder’s Top 10” offers Salò on Friday, Walsh‘s The Naked and the Dead & Visconti‘s The Damned on Saturday, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Sunday. All are on 35mm.

Roman Polanski‘s Frantic shows this Sunday, as does Ashes and Embers.

Spirited Away and The Cat Returns play as part of “Studio Ghibli Weekends.

The Metrograph is screening all ten of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's favorite films: Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Vasily Shukshin's The Red Snowball Tree, Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored, Max Ophuls's Lola Montes, Michael Curtiz's Flamingo Road, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead and Luchino Visconti's The Damned. Also in New York: King Hu’s A Touch of Zen and work by Luis Ospina. Screening tonight in Chicago: Nathan Silver's Riot, Mike Ott's Lancaster, CA and William Greaves's In the Company of Men. And we have a few more goings on. » - David Hudson...

The Metrograph is screening all ten of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's favorite films: Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Vasily Shukshin's The Red Snowball Tree, Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored, Max Ophuls's Lola Montes, Michael Curtiz's Flamingo Road, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead and Luchino Visconti's The Damned. Also in New York: King Hu’s A Touch of Zen and work by Luis Ospina. Screening tonight in Chicago: Nathan Silver's Riot, Mike Ott's Lancaster, CA and William Greaves's In the Company of Men. And we have a few more goings on. » - David Hudson...

Each weekend we highlight the best repertory programming that New York City has to offer, and it’s about to get even better. Opening on February 19th at 7 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side is Metrograph, the city’s newest indie movie theater. Sporting two screens, they’ve announced their first slate, which includes retrospectives for Fassbinder, Wiseman, Eustache, and more, special programs such as an ode to the moviegoing experience, and new independent features that we’ve admired on the festival circuit (including Afternoon, Office 3D, and Measure of a Man).

Artistic and Programming Director Jacob Perlin says in a press release, “Jean Eustache in a Rocky t-shirt. This is the image we had in mind while making this first calendar. Great cinema is there, wherever you can find it. The dismissed film now recognized as a classic, the forgotten box-office hit newly resurrected, the high and the low,...

Raymond Massey ca. 1940. Raymond Massey movies: From Lincoln to Boris Karloff Though hardly remembered today, the Toronto-born Raymond Massey was a top supporting player – and sometime lead – in both British and American movies from the early '30s all the way to the early '60s. During that period, Massey was featured in nearly 50 films. Turner Classic Movies generally selects the same old MGM / Rko / Warner Bros. stars for its annual “Summer Under the Stars” series. For that reason, it's great to see someone like Raymond Massey – who was with Warners in the '40s – be the focus of a whole day: Sat., Aug. 8, '15. (See TCM's Raymond Massey movie schedule further below.) Admittedly, despite his prestige – his stage credits included the title role in the short-lived 1931 Broadway production of Hamlet – the quality of Massey's performances varied wildly. Sometimes he could be quite effective; most of the time, however, he was an unabashed scenery chewer,...

(Charles Laughton, 1955; Arrow, 15)

One of the greatest, most influential directorial debuts in movie history, The Night of the Hunter was a major critical and commercial failure in 1955, and Charles Laughton never directed another film, which was bad for him, bad for us and bad for Norman Mailer, whose The Naked and the Dead was to be Laughton's follow-up project.

Based on Davis Grubb's gothic novel, it's a grim fairytale for adults set in poverty-stricken West Virginia during the depression and centres on a father going to the gallows for murder after concealing some stolen money in his little daughter's doll and swearing her brother to secrecy. An ogre in the form of a psychotic preacher (Robert Mitchum's best, most scary performance), who'd shared a cell with their father, is after the loot. When this monstrous figure of pure evil takes over the impoverished family, the children flee down the Ohio river,...

Director Charles Laughton’s and screenwriter James Agee’s adaptation of the novel The Night of the Hunter has become a reverently admired and extremely influential film in the 60 years since the ‘failure’ of its initial release. The film has placed very highly in many international critical polls, including Cahier du Cinema’s 2007 listing of the ‘100 Most Beautiful Films’, where it sits at #2. Many filmmakers have cited it as a key inspiration, and Steven Spielberg showed it to the crew of E.T. in order to help them understand the child’s perspective from which he wanted the film to be told. It was even re-made as a virtually unwatchable 1991 TV movie with Richard Chamberlain as Harry Powell, and a musical stage version was created in the late ‘90s for which a soundtrack CD is available.

Perhaps the most important indication of the esteem in which the film is now held...

Above: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1932).

When I wrote about the posters of 1933 last week this was one poster I deliberately held back (though 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was released on Christmas Eve 1932, it is included in Film Forum’s retrospective). The early 1930s, no less than today—though the execution was a lot more interesting— was an era of big floating heads in movie posters. While 1920s movies had the occasional floating head poster for their biggest stars, artists and studios still favored the look of early silent posters with their head-to-toe portraits and snippets of narrative. Though Norma Desmond said famously of the silent era “We didn’t need dialogue...we had faces!” it was ironically with the coming of sound that faces started to dominate movie posters and, until Saul Bass, minimalism in American movie posters was almost non-existent.

All that makes the 20,000 Years poster,...

Fuck!

And now that I’ve established my bona fides, let’s get to today’s topic: naughty words.

They aren’t new, these verbal no-nos. Virtually every culture has had them, though their content, even allowing for translation glitches, is not always the same. (My doo-doo is your Number Two?) I don’t know how far back on civilization’s continuum the use and misuse of these words goes. Did the early farmers, about thirty centuries ago, have them? How about the hunter-gatherers? The guys who made the cave pictures?

Maybe some of you have answers; I don’t, but I do know that ever since we homo sapiens started hanging around in cities and having politics and organized games and such, we’ve been able to let go of frustration by uttering, or shouting, some syllables that redden mom’s ears.

Even within my brief lifetime (okay, not...

Provocative, rebellious, a genius and an undeniable force on the American literary landscape, Norman Mailer was an author, social commentator, filmmaker and a personality whose outsized figure nearly eclipsed his two Pulitzer prizes. He had enough experiences and adventures for three lifetimes, and trying to capture him in a documentary and uncover what made him tick is a monumental task. And so Joseph Mantegna's (not the actor), less-than-90-minute film "Norman Mailer: The American" barely scratches the surface, giving a superficial, fast-forward look at his life, with a focus more on the tawdry and salacious, than on the influences and inspirations behind a writer who was equally celebrated and vilified throughout his career.

Are you looking for anything regarding insight into his novels? You won't find it here. Mantegna is in such a hurry to get to the incident in which Mailer stabbed his second wife, which he followed by spending 17 days at Bellvue,...

For the next three weeks, Vulture is holding the ultimate Drama Derby to determine the greatest TV drama of the past 25 years. Each day a different notable writer will be charged with determining the winner of a round of the bracket, until New York Magazine TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz judges the finals on March 23. Today's inaugural battle: author Darin Strauss judges The Sopranos vs. Six Feet Under. The Sopranos was — Christ, you already know what The Sopranos was. The invention of a miracle; the beginning. But exactly what did The Sopranos begin? Well, the new artistry and the new canard-istry — this TV show had the world saying TV shows were Literature 2.0, saying the Great American Novel aired every Sunday, 10 p.m., on premium cable. This was not true. The Sopranos didn’t add up to Gatsby or The Naked and the Dead. Still, it was a colossal, bruising...

"Cliff Robertson, who starred as John F Kennedy in a 1963 World War II drama and later won an Academy Award for his portrayal of a mentally disabled bakery janitor in the movie Charly, died Saturday, one day after his 88th birthday," reports Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times, adding that Robertson " also played a real-life role as the whistle-blower in the check-forging scandal of then-Columbia Pictures President David Begelman that rocked Hollywood in the late 1970s… In a more than 50-year career in films, Robertson appeared in some 60 movies, including Pt 109, My Six Loves, Sunday in New York, The Best Man, The Devil's Brigade, Three Days of the Condor, Obsession and Star 80. More recently, he played Uncle Ben Parker in the Spider-Man films."

In Charly, "he played a lovable bakery worker with the Iq of a 5-year-old whose intelligence is raised to genius level by an experiment,...

He played leads – but never became a star. He played supporting parts – but was never considered a second-stringer. He moved between the big and little screen easily throughout much of his career without ever looking like he’d overreached (for the former), or was slumming (in the latter). The only thing that mattered – the one thing that was consistent whatever the vehicle, whatever the medium, whatever the size of the role – was the caliber of his work. By his own description, Cliff Robertson, who passed away this week one day after his 88th birthday, was a “utility player” who shone whatever his position.

Still in his 20s, he was already working regularly on TV during those early, hectic days of live broadcasting in the early 1950s, and just as immediately demonstrating the utility that marked his career. His range was limitless as he performed in everything from heavyweight drama anthology...

New York — President John F. Kennedy had just one critique when he saw photos of the actor set to play him in a World War II drama.

The year was 1963 and actor Cliff Robertson looked convincing in his costume for "Pt-109," the first film to portray a sitting president. Kennedy had favored Robertson for the role, but one detail was off.

Robertson's hair was parted on the wrong side.

The actor dutifully trained his locks to part on the left and won praise for a role he'd remain proud of throughout his life.

Robertson, who went on to win an Oscar for his portrayal of a mentally disabled man in "Charly", died of natural causes Saturday afternoon in Stony Brook, a day after his 88th birthday, according to Evelyn Christel, his secretary of 53 years.

Robertson never elevated into the top ranks of leading men, but he remained a popular actor...

Star Trek actor William Campbell has died, aged 87.

Campbell, who played Klingon warrior Captain Koloth on Star Trek, also teamed up with Elvis Presley in his first film Love Me Tender.

He was married to President John F. Kennedy's one-time girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner.

Campbell made his film debut in The Breaking Point in the early 1950s. He also appeared in Cell 2455 Death Row in 1955, The Naked and the Dead and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

Harper

Just over a year ago, after selling my second novel, Skinny, I sent some friends a text message: “My book sold! Come celebrate!”

We began at 5 p.m. One friend who couldn’t make it called the bar and bought us a bottle of Veuve. Someone ordered shots. So did someone else. I think someone else did, too.

“You must be so excited!” one friend said, hugging me.

Oh, yes! I’d sold a book. I’d thrown myself a party.

Most summers, the biggest late-week concern among publishing honchos is Long Island Expressway traffic to the Hamptons. This week has proven different. Debate is raging about how vulnerable major publishing houses suddenly are after book agent Andrew Wylie formed an electronic publishing imprint for his authors and made an exclusive deal with Amazon. This means that instead of leaving it to a publisher and taking a low split, Wylie gave Amazon sole e-book rights to titles like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, John Updike’s Rabbit Run series, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. You can read all of them only on the Kindle for $9.99 each, under Wylie’s own Odyssey Editions imprint. Random House responded with sheer thuggery, blacklisting Wylie in...

Tuli Kupferberg is better off dead. My friend and counter-cultural icon had been suffering from a couple of strokes, hospitals, breathing tubes, feeding tubes, anemia, infections, blindness, catheter, hearing aids, wheelchairs, psychosis, memory loss, diapers, constipation, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, fatigue and a chronically bed-ridden life that seemed to be no life worth living. Tuli was a dedicated truthseeker, and I'd like to honor that quality with a couple of truths. There was a rumor that Philip Roth had lifted the onanistically obsessed idea for Portnoy's Complaint from a song by the Fugs -- a band on the cusp of rock and punk, named after Norman Mailer's euphemism for fuck in The Naked and the Dead -- but this notion was disavowed by Fugs leader Ed Sanders, who assured me, "Philip Roth did not plagiarize a Fugs song. He came to a Fugs show...

Fugs co-founder Tuli Kupferberg, a social and political provocateur for decades, died yesterday at the age of 86. The longtime downtown-Manhattan resident, whose wife, Sylvia Topp, is a freelance copy editor for Vanity Fair and a writer, started out as a jazz-loving Beat poet but became best known for the underground group he formed with his friend Ed Sanders, then the owner of a Village bookstore, in 1965. Proto-punks, the largely untrained Fugs—whose name Kupferberg derived from Norman Mailer’s substitution (under pressure) for “fuck” in The Naked and the Dead—played their often ribald songs with exuberant abandon; they were a staple at anti-war protests, performing such songs as “Kill for Peace.” “We vowed to live from our art, to have fun and party continuously, and to get our brains on tape,” Sanders has written on the band’s Web site. With that vow, Kupferberg, then in his 40s, paved...

A Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks TV series about the second world war's brutal Pacific campaign begins tomorrow – a story surprisingly little told because, for years, the public has preferred to turn away from its dark undertone of racism and savagery

When Tom Hanks was making Saving Private Ryan, the writer Nora Ephron sent him a book that weighs in at almost 2,000 pages: the Library of America's Reporting World War II. It was a thoughtful gift, appropriate to his then role as an infantry captain on D-Day. But when Hanks began dipping into the collection, he remarked earlier this month, what gripped him the most was not the war in Europe but the other great Us campaign of the second world war – the battle for the Pacific.

There was an irony in his interest. Hanks is the son of a naval mechanic who served in the Pacific, but when he first picked up the book,...