What Makes Things Go Right or Wrong For Novelists in Hollywood?
This Week on The Writers Institute Podcast, From the Archives of the New York State Writers Institute
Books are written in solitude, but writers do some of their finest work with crowds—in public talks, interviews, and events. The best moments from those strange, dramatic interactions often go missing, however: either they’re never recorded, or nobody will ever find the recordings. Fortunately, the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany has been methodically recording thousands of writers’ events since 1983, when it was founded by the novelist William Kennedy.
You’ll hear Don DeLillo say in this episode that “the best sort of television has almost replaced a certain kind of novel.” That’s from a Writers Institute event nearly fifteen years ago, and while conversations about novelistic TV have changed since then, novelists continue to bring their sensibilities to television. Among those writers is Amelia Gray—author of startling short stories and novels—who’s written for shows including Maniac and Mr. Robot. Gray says here that “TV is a writer’s medium. In features they’ll still take it away from you, and have you do a bunch of rewrites, and then it’s the director’s baby, and that’s just how it is. But TV is so big and unwieldy that they need the writers.”
On the subject of writers struggling with feature films, we listen to the novelist Russell Banks in conversation with Don DeLillo about their friend Nelson Algren, whose novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, was adapted into a 1955 Otto Preminger film with Frank Sinatra—a film Algren loathed. Banks has had happier experiences with film adaptations of his novels, on the other hand, and DeLillo’s White Noise has now been adapted into a film by Noah Baumbach. The question is: what makes things go right or wrong for novelists in Hollywood?
On this episode:
Amelia Gray (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Isadora and Museum of the Weird.
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Don DeLillo (from the archives). Books: White Noise and Underworld.
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Russell Banks (from the archives). Books: The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction
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William Kennedy (conversation with Adam Colman). Books: Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.
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Find out more about the New York State Writers Institute at www.nyswritersinstitute.org.
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Amelia Gray is the author of five books, most recently Isadora (FSG). Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and
