(Source: sk-eleton, via cheskaravela)
An intense page from Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ Notebook. This is an amazing example of the intensity Francis Ford Coppola once brought to his films.
A fascinating article from the March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair describes how The Godfather got made, even though the producers, the real-life Mafia, Frank Sinatra, and Paramount executives all fought against it.
One of the most quoted lines from Puzo’s novel never made it to the screen: “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Before his death, in 1999, Puzo said in a symposium, “I think the movie business is far more crooked than Vegas, and, I was going to say, than the Mafia.” By the time The Godfather had begun production, Mob lawyers and business operatives were walking down the hallways of Gulf & Western together. Unbeknownst to the moviemakers, Charlie Bluhdorn was even doing business with a shadowy Sicilian named Michele Sindona, a money-launderer and adviser to the Gambino and other Mob families as well as to the Vatican Bank, in Rome (elements that Coppola would use in plotting The Godfather: Part III). In 1970, the year The Godfather began production at Paramount, Bluhdorn made a deal with Sindona that resulted in the mobster’s construction and real-estate company’s owning a major share of the Paramount lot. In 1980, Sindona was convicted on 65 counts, including fraud and perjury. Four years later he was extradited to Italy and found guilty of ordering a murder. In his Milan jail cell, he swallowed—or got fed—a lethal dose of cyanide, the prescription favored by the Mob to silence stool pigeons.
The Mob and the moviemakers had been acting in unison all along.
Get this. Google Books is hosting a digital archive of the first 30 years of New York Magazine (1968 through 1997). Amongst this bewildering wilderness of magazines is a real treasure - an August 21, 1972, article written by Mario Puzo on his experience writing the novel and the screenplay for The Godfather. Yeah, baby!
It’s a great article, too. First, you gotta go here, which will take you to the contents page. In the upper left-hand corner you’ll see the little summary of the Puzo article and above that, you’ll see “page 22.” That’s a link. Click that, and it’ll take you to the article. (source: Mario Puzo Speaks from the Grave!)
Nine Tips for Academics Writing for a General Audience
1) Keep your introduction brief, and introductory. Many academic introductions take on the task of presenting the entire book in miniature. In a trade book, the introduction to a book is the entrance hall – a place to hang up your coat, adjust to the temperature, meet your hosts, get a sense of why they have invited you over, appreciate their aesthetic sensibility and perhaps background, before stepping into the first room. It is not a quick tour around the whole house really fast before going through it all again slowly.
2) People the story. As one academic pointed out to a publishing panel, “You talk a lot about narrative. We academics all think our work has a narrative, but I think you must mean something different than we do. Do your narratives have to have people in them?” The short answer is yes, the more successfully you can write about people, and use their stories to carry the weight of your research, the more likely the book is to reach a wide audience. It is, of course, not the only way to do so. In some great books, an idea or a place is really the protagonist. Making the reader care as much about the idea or place as he or she might about a human character is hard to do, but a literary achievement when it happens.
3) Let the people move. Often, a person in an academic book is a portrait on the wall – born at a certain time in a certain place, surrounded by carefully selected context, but not actually doing anything. Yet if you introduce a person actually doing something, and hang other information off the spine of that narrative, a non-academic reader is immediately more engaged.
4) Honor chronology. Academic work is often organized thematically, but in writing for general readers, chronology is almost always your best friend. It can heighten a sense of narrative and its inherent tensions and conflicts, forces a degree of clarity about cause and effect (or lack thereof), and, corresponding as it does with the way our brains and lives are generally organized, frees up the reader’s mental space to focus on the rest of what you have to say.
5) Don’t bury your favorite details. Sometimes young academics, in particular, put their most delightful and colorful material in the footnotes, saying they thought the material was too good to part with, but not strictly essential to their academic argument. If it’s really too good to part with, it might be put to better use, as the proverbial sugar that makes the medicine go down, from a non-academic reader’s perspective.
6) Don’t talk down to your audience. To their credit, many academics are so excited about their subjects that they want to write a book that their mother-in-laws or personal trainers will read. But unless that person you would love to reach is someone who buys at least a half dozen books or more a year, and reads widely, he or she is not the person you should be holding in mind as your intended audience. Very few books make non-readers into readers. Regular readers and buyers of trade books by academics are generally more sophisticated than average, and don’t want to be made to feel like they are still in high-school.
7) Accept that some subjects are inherently of minor interest and others fall into genres that have become overcrowded. Many talented scholars, particularly in history, have taken seriously the idea of writing for a broader public and still found that their books reach only a relatively limited audience, because, actually, there were a lot of dramatic trials in the 19th century that evoke issues that are still with us, and quite a few books about them, too. For most readers, these were still cases they never heard of that took place long ago involving people they don’t want to know. Most books will reach only a limited audience, no matter how hard the author and the publisher try.
8) A book should not be one’s first and only attempt to address the public. Essays and book reviews for newspapers or general interest magazines, public lectures, and radio commentary are great ways to cultivate both a public voice and an audience.
9) To recycle an old creative writing maxim, “Break any rule when to do so serves a higher purpose” – or, when you can write so brilliantly as to get away with it.
—Alane Salierno Mason (@amasonny), W. W. Norton Executive Editor
In a tiny corner of western Poland a forest of about 400 pine trees grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks - all bent northward. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees, or “Crooked Forest,” is a mystery.
(Source: excisions, via emotionalturmoil)
Game of Thrones Last Supper
Its been a crazy week, and Im behind, I know this. I hope this fabulous Last Supper in Westeros print keeps you coming back.
