Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia had a very
successful premiere at Tribeca Film Festival, but director Nicholas Wrathall and his team still need help with the final
archival materials and post production.
You can help...and be mentioned in the credits!
Check out the Kickstarter campaign.
But deadline is fast approaching… please get involved.
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Here's the official website of Nicholas Wrathall's new documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia:
The documentary garnered a great review by Erica Abeel (author, Conscience Point) in HuffPost:
For sheer entertainment value, few docs can equal Gore Vidal the United States of Amnesia...a portrait of the novelist, playwright, polemicist, public intellectual, and bullshit detector. Screenings at the Tribeca Film Fest [sold out].... Vidal (who died at 86 in 2012) was of the aristocracy and related to American royalty (his mother married an Auchincloss). Yet he betrayed his class a la FDR with a vengeance. An iconoclast ahead of his time, he candidly wrote about homosexuality in an early novel, The City and the Pillar, which got him blacklisted by book critics at the New York Times. He knew everyone and went everywhere but became mordantly critical of privilege and what he called the "American Empire," offering, in his view, "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor."
The documentary was written up in Rolling Stone recently, and Robert De Niro stated that it was on his personal short list of must-see films at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Ron Mwangaguhunga of IFC TV tweeted "amazing documentary on the irrepressible Gore Vidal "The United States of Amnesia" is the best doc I've seen in years.…"; Carl Ansley the tech entrepreneur and investor in TapMesh and TxVia tweeted, "really funny, thought-provoking shit-stirring stuff. Needs/deserves/will get a wide audience"; and Bevy Smith tweeted it was "More than a doc it was an autobiography" of a man she "long admired."
See the interview with Nicholas Wrathall on HuffPostLive about the documentary:
Remember, you can help fund the completion of this documentary to ensure it enjoys a post-Tribeca life.
You can make a tax-deductible contribution via USA Projects (deadline May 13, 2013) or you can contribute via Kickstarter (deadline May 11, 2013).
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[After the December 17, 1835, NYC great fire] Like everyone else in the city, I was awake the whole night. Half the First Ward has burned down.
It was Dante's Hell: ice and fire together. A horrible racket of bells pealing, of fire-engines clattering, of houses collapsing. At midnight the sky was like a red dawn. Today every New Yorker who knows how to read mentions The Last Days of Pompeii.
I am thankful that I won't be required to describe what I saw. Memory too crowded with fiery images. Wall Street in flames. A freezing wind full of fire--an anomaly.
Suddenly the new Merchants' Exchange vanishes in a long wave of flame. A moment later I was able to see through the walls to the statue beneath the dome of Alexander Hamilton [in the church graveyard.]
From nowhere, a half-dozen young sailors raced into the building and tried to save the statue. They pulled the figure off its pedestal but then the police forced them out of the building just in time for with a hissing sigh the dome fell in and Hamilton was seen no more (his would-be rescuer was a young officer from the Navy Yard--a banker's son, who else?).
A group of Irish approached [Leggett and I] and said, "They'll be making no more of them five-per-cent dividends, with they now?".... Leggett grinned and gave [the speaker] a thumbs-up.
In the side streets the shopkeepers were gloomily digging among the ashes to see what the fire had spared. In Pearl Street there are miles of scorched cloth stacked on the side-walls. In Fulton Street furniture. Nearly every street like an open bazaar of ruined good. The poor steal whatever they can, particularly food...as do the pigs, who have declared themselves a national holiday and are now rampant.... The only contented sound in the city is their squeaking and snorting as they turn up delicacies where once were taverns, grocery shops, homes."
Image (click to enlarge) - View of the Great Fire in N.York, Dec. 16th & 17, 1835, as seen from Williamsburg (sic), by Nicolino Caly, circa 1835. Medium gouache on paper mounted on canvas, on stretcher, 7.7 × 11.5 in, collection of the New York Historical Society.
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From Gore Vidal's essay "Writers and the World," Times Literary Supplement (London), November 25, 1965:
The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. "A talent is formed in stillness," wrote Goethe, "a character in the stream of the world." Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both. But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the World lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. This is sad. Until one recalls how many bad books the World may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers turned Worldly. The romantic-puritans can find consolation in that, and take pleasure in realizing that there is a rude justice, finally, even in the best of worlds.
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''The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn't justify the means, and I think he was right." - Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale
Carter:
Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.
And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviors, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.
- Yale Divinity School's Reflections: Who Are We? American Values Revisited, Fall 2012
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If you have access to a UK-licensed version of iPlayer for TV programming, you can watch online BBC Four's 2-part Omnibus program about Gore Vidal.
(Contrary to popular believe, one can access UK-licensed iPlayer TV programming from outside of the UK--iPlayer radio is almost always widely available--however it requires a paid subscription to a VPN service, usually for around only $10 a month.)
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HuffingtonPost asked me to write something about Gore Vidal for the HuffPost Books section.
Vidal tributes and obits will briefly abound. Yes, he was a sharp, cynical, free-thinking satirist in the style of Mark Twain and H. L. Menken. Yes, he was raised in the twilight of the Washington D.C. political class when there actually was such a thing, when Washington was still a shockingly sleepy Southern city vacated by the electeds every summer. (Vidal once remarked that air-conditioning helped found the American empire by letting bureaucrats stay in town year-round making mischief.) Yes, he had a lot of cameos in a lot of films, wined and dined a lot of famous friends at his Ravello home, La Rondinaia, had famous foes, and managed to outlive pretty much all of them.
And he made it all look easy. But it wasn't.
More at www.huffingtonpost.com
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Broadway theaters will dim their marquee lights on Friday night in memory of Gore Vidal and the cast of his play "The Best Man" will dedicate the next week of performances to the author and playwright. The Broadway League said Wednesday the lights will be dimmed for one minute at exactly 8 p.m. EDT Friday. Executive Director Charlotte St. Martin called Vidal's work both "timely and timeless."
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In Memoriam
Left: Warrant Officer Junior Grade Gore Vidal circa 1944, the Gore Vidal Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; right: Gore Vidal in 2006 © Stathis Orphanos
October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012
Writer and provocateur of America's mid-century political and literary circles, Gore Vidal was raised in a prominent Washington D.C. Democratic family but describes himself as a conservative. He was the son of airline pioneer Eugene Vidal, grandson of Oklahoma Sen. T. P. Gore, stepbrother of Jackie Kennedy, and friend of writers and actors including Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, Christopher Isherwood, Tim Robbins, and Paul Newman. A man of contradictions, he has been described as controversial, playful, acerbic, arrogant, and warm; as a gadfly, a conspiracy junkie, a paleo-isolationist, an America-hater, and a patriot; but also "the master essayist of our age" by the Washington Post and America's "greatest living man of letters" by The Boston Globe. He explored history, religion, sex, politics, and power in 25 novels--including his "Narratives of Empire" series about American history--several plays, movie scripts, and more than 200 essays.
PHOTO GALLERY, The New York Times: Gore Vidal 1925-2012
The New York Times: Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer
San Francisco Chronicle: Gore Vidal, Celebrated Author, Playwright, Dies
BBC News: US Author Gore Vidal Dies Aged 86
The Guardian: Gore Vidal, US writer and contrarian, dies aged 86
CNN: Chronicler of American life and politics, dies (and CNN "This Just In" blog: A dozen thoughts from Gore Vidal)
The Atlantic: Gore Vidal - A Salute to Self-Absorbed yet Selfless Genius
Word & Film: Remembering Gore Vidal - Cultural Polymath, Political Gadfly, and Social Butterfly
AntiWar.com: Gore Vidal - the Last Jeffersonian
HuffingtonPost: The Legacy of Gore Vidal
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In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, poetical ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. When the air is clear, you can see across borders; when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.
Atypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. This is why he can be trusted. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. Vidal is not a romantic—his mind is empirical. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority.
Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing.
John Cotter's look at the essays of Gore Vidal for the 5-year anniversary of Open Letter Monthly.
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