How Presidents Talk

My father, the Big Band man, had a record in his collection that I heard quite a bit growing up. His 1971 album featured three pieces by the composer Aaron Copland, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra: Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, and Lincoln Portrait.

Lincoln Portrait is a fifteen-minute, music and spoken-word piece that is, as of this writing, eighty-four years old. Tradition calls for actors and other individuals of prominence to read the 400-word text. The recording I heard was performed by the actor Henry Fonda, who played the president in Young Mr. Lincoln and who subsequently ruined all other narrators for me. When I recently queued up Lincoln Portrait read by Darth Vader James Earl Jones on my phone, I expected great things. But no—Jones was too over the top. I think I caught him enunciating a comma.

Copland composed Portrait in 1942 when asked by the Russian-American composer Andre Kostelanetz to create a work that would celebrate a prominent American. World War II was on, and creative people of all types were being pressed into service to create art that would keep American minds on task. Copland suggested Whitman, but Jerome Kern had already picked Twain. Kostelanetz suggested Copland choose someone else—a statesman, not a writer. “[A]ny personality that is to be expressed with music should have some kind of humane aspect,” Copland would later tell an interviewer, “which is precisely what attracted me to Lincoln.”

As a subject, Lincoln was the perfect figure for that time, and always. Composers well before Copland had penned musical tributes to the gangly lawyer from Springfield. From the early part of the 20th century politicians of every stripe trotted him out, regardless of their persuasion. Progressives, leftists, radicals, Republicans and Democrats alike. FDR invoked him, suggesting that the Great Emancipator would have embraced the New Deal.

Copland had seen people suffer during the Depression; he was drawn to the plight of workers and the ideology of Communism, of all things, which would haunt his career after the war. But he, like others, believed Lincoln spoke for the common man (sans fanfare), the downtrodden, the masses. The words he selected from Lincoln’s writing hammered home principles that everyone who lived on the continent in that era had presumably agreed to embrace: freedom and democracy.

The historian Pauline Maier, in her book, American Scripture, discusses this at length. Lincoln’s genius was taking a forgotten document written in 1776 and linking it to a troubled moment in the mid 1800s, enshrining it as the nation’s critical founding document. The Constitution was the law of the land, but the Declaration was gospel. Lincoln had a flair for making political language sound sacrosanct.

In my thirties, I had a coach who loved smashing icons. He hated Democrats mostly, but for a born-and-bred Kentuckian he took strange aim at Lincoln. “You know,” he said once during a break in our sparring, “there is no evidence that he ever read a book.”

Bullshit, I thought then, and I stand by that today. Even before I knew about the sources he had drawn upon for his famous Cooper Union speech in 1860, it was obvious to me that Lincoln had read at least one tome: the King James Bible. Parallelism...chiasmus...he was all over it.

Copland incorporated five Lincoln texts in his Portrait. I’ve heard the piece so many times that I can practically quote them from memory. This week I went back and looked at the originals, in part to see what Copland left out.

In the selections that follow, I am bolding the lines Copland used. Copland did not preserve Lincoln’s underlines, which historians usually render as italics. The narrators of Lincoln Portrait are always given latitude to speak the lines as they see fit. The italics show which words Lincoln probably stressed.

Here’s the first, taken from the Annual Message to Congress, dated December 1, 1862, about a month before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation:

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

You don’t have to go far, even in this selection, to see that its writer has wholly mastered that Biblical tone. When he uses an adverb, he makes it work. Words are not repeated unless they do double duty.

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose…”

“In giving freedom…we assure freedom…”

He could have ended the graf with “and God must bless forever,” but then it would not so nicely echo “will forever applaud.” Ask yourself: is it a politician who has commanded our attention—or a preacher?

“fiery trial…”

“Plain, peaceful, generous, just…”

“Will light us down…”

Gotta admit, Coach: this is damn fine writing from a fellow who never cracked a book. We should all be so illiterate.

Copland’s second quote is taken from earlier in this very same message to Congress:

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

I love this:

“quiet past…stormy present…”

“….is new, think anew, act anew.”

I have always liked the use of the word disenthrall in this sentence, but I needed to research what historians think he was really saying. They read it as tearing ourselves away from a system that we know is no longer working.

Copland’s third textual choice comes from the final debate with Stephen Douglas (October 15, 1858), in which Lincoln framed their senate race—as so many have—as a battle between good and evil, right and wrong. His oft-quoted “a house divided cannot stand” from this speech is paraphrased from the book of Matthew. But that’s not what Copland chose to quote. He went straight for the graf that would find favor with modern listeners:

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

Earlier that year, Lincoln had made the same point, with similar phraseology, in another speech. Only then, instead of referring to this paradigm as "the same tyrannical principle," he dubbed it "the same old serpent."

A while back I learned that when Apple’s founder Steve Jobs was drafting a speech, for weeks he would tap out and shoot short emails to himself with a flurry of sentences and ideas that occurred to him. Lincoln did the same: he grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote short notes to himself. The three-line scrap that follows was found among his personal effects. He never inserted it into a speech, and his secretaries were unable to shed much light on their origin or intended use. Copland works it in as his third quote. And by now, coming after the tyrannical principle line above, two underlined words take on enlarged meanings. Again, these are Lincoln’s italics.

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

Copland ends with the final 71 words of the Gettysburg address. I’ll spare you the lines. You can probably hear them in your soul.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

He spoke those words on a battlefield after a far more famous orator intoned his way through a two-hour speech. Lincoln rose, spoke for two minutes, and later confided to friends that he had utterly botched it. “It is a flat failure,” he told his bodyguard.

Well, sure: what can we expect from such a bookless wonder?

During the Portrait’s premieres in 1942, Kostelanetz observed that the piece was received differently depending on the news of the day. When newspapers were filled with news of American victories abroad, thunderous applause. When the news was somber, audiences left hushed, perhaps struck by the long road ahead and the work democracy demands of us. And for a few years after World War II, Copland endured his own fiery trials at the hands of McCarthy.

And yes, I suppose I understand what Coach was getting at…maybe. Lincoln was no saint. Go back and read some of the fourth debate with Douglas. For the first half of the speech, he’s playing African Americans for laughs, bending over backward to reassure his audience that he doesn’t really think a black person will ever be the equal of a white person. Once he gets them on his side, he hammers home that if he had his druthers, he would change this one little thing about American life. But it’s an ugly windup.

But then, at Gettysburg, he again rescued that one word, equal, from a document many of his colleagues had either forgotten, maligned, or had willfully misremembered, insisting that we regard this dirty, five-letter word as the prime directive of the American experiment. One can see why historians find it hard to disenthrall themselves from his words and actions, even today. They probably never will.

A while back, when she spoke at the Abraham Lincoln Association in Springfield, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told her audience:

“It’s not just that he was a great president, that he won the war, ended slavery, and saved the Union. It was his kindness, his sensitivity, his empathy, his willingness to let those past resentments go. I had the feeling that he had the normal human emotions of envy and anger and jealousy, but somehow he would say, ‘You have to damp them down because they’ll fester if you allow them inside. They’ll poison you.’”

She spoke those words in 2018. She was describing an imperfect human being who was, if nothing else, a well-read, mature adult. Even in 2018, the thought of a president who actively worked to shun resentment must have seemed quaint to her audience of Lincoln admirers in Springfield.

Each year around this time I am reminded that the US has bundled Lincoln and Washington's birthdays (February 12th and 22nd, respectively) into one collective Presidents' Day. I understand the reasons for this choice, but just as Copland declined to compose a piece about Washington, thinking him too stiff and formal, I am drawn still to the rail-splitter.

If nothing else, family lore compels me. On the occasion of her naturalization, I am told, my Italian-born grandmother was asked to name the 16th US President.

"Ling-a-ling," she replied in the accent that she would carry for the rest of her days.

By then, she was a married woman, a homeowner, a taxpayer, and the mother of three (young) American citizens. Her examiner granted her citizenship, or I suppose I would not be writing these words.

My fellow writers, we cannot escape history. A strangely comforting thought that one clings to in dark hours.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Thoughts on Writing & Memory

While digging into my current WIP I found myself harking back to some of the questions I asked in the course of writing this post from a few years ago regarding the human memory and the writer's attempts to play with memory over the course of a narrative. Worth diving into again, and I stand by the recommendations below. Happy Valentine's Day to all who observe it!

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Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

                 

                                      — Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator

My brother-in-law has a saying: "With family, it is best to have a short memory." 

I was thinking about this quote during a recent conversation I had with my wife. She showed me a photo of something and I asked her what it was. She said to me, "I showed you this thing just the other day."

I responded with an intelligent, "You did?"

And, in that patient tone she tends to employ with me when I'm being especially dense (it happens a lot), she said, "Yes, and you said at the time, 'Looks exactly like I pictured it.'”

I have no memory of this conversation. Or had no memory of it, until my wife reminded me of what I had said.  And I think this is an interesting illustration of how tricky human memory can be.

And what’s even trickier is trying to write human memory in all of its forms: straight remembering; having some thing tickle at the back of your skull, but you can’t quite put your finger on it; not remembering at all, etc.

Luckily we're not talking about THIS kind of "Memory."

One of the things that I have always prided myself on throughout my life, is my memory. Now deep in the midst of my late 50s, I find certain names dates, etc., elude me and I have to reach for them. 

I have also noticed, as illustrated in the instance related above, that my mind is pretty efficient about discarding memory that is trivial or completely unimportant to my long-term goals, to my long-term interests, or to anything other than being in the moment. 

And yet other such memories, the feeling of hiking the Virgin River in Zion National Park, for example, could be a cursory memory that some people wouldn’t remember. And yet I do, and I don’t just remember the hiking. I also remember the sun filtering off the canyon walls, the smell of the river, as I waded through it, the sound of people murmuring to each other as they hiked up the river, and so on and so forth.

Like I said, memory is a tricky thing. 

And it's even more dicey to effectively to write about it. 

Some examples that spring to mind (Warning: there are a few SPOILERS looming ahead)

In his novel Inferno Dan Brown has his protagonist Robert Langdon awaken in an Italian hospital with no memory of the past several days, and he spends the lion's share of of the rest of the book trying to put together some fragmented images and some sentence fragments, especially the repeated phrase “very sorry,” repeated over and over again. Turns out he was thinking of the Italian artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari.

For my money, Brown draws this out quite a bit longer than necessary, and this eventual "revelation" is expected to carry far too much of the load as a plot transition point. This is no criticism of Dan Brown. Far from it. I'll be the first to say that his experiment with the vagaries of a fragmented memory and their collective effect on the narrative, especially when the point-of-view character is the one struggling with their memory, is one worth taking. And it's definitely a larger risk than I have taken in my own fiction writing.

This trope has been around for a while. Memory loss has frequently been used as a crutch tossed into any number of formulaic novels/films/TV shows over the years, with mixed results. Thinking especially of some good examples (The Prisoner, starring the inimitable Patrick McGoohan, and the ambitious World War II psychological thriller 36 Hours–a film featuring superb performances by James Garner, Eva Marie Saint and Rod Taylor–both come to mind) and some hokey ones (Pretty much anything produced by 60s/70s Hollywood TV heavyweight Quinn Martin, with the exception of two stand-out series (The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco).

And there are, of course, many other relatively recent novels/films that have played around with sketchy memory: not least the Guy Pearce vehicle Memento, which turns on the point of view character having brain damage that has affected his ability to process short-term memory into long-term memory, and Dennis Lehane's terrific novel (and the Martin Scorsese-helmed film of the same name adapted from it) Shutter Island–a master class in the use of an unreliable narrator.

Other successful novels (and films adapted from them) in the unreliable narrator vein include such bestsellers as The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, neither of which I have read–Or maybe I actually have, and just don't remember? (*rimshot*)–and both of which I am given to understand make use of questionable memory on the part of the main character (at least in part alcohol-induced). 

There have been so many films of this variety, that the whole subgenre even has its own excellent parody: the 2022 Netflix miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. It's worth your time. Kristen Bell alone as the main character is worth the price of admission.

For me, though, no one has ever done the "shattered memory holding back the main character, who must race against time to put the pieces together" thing quite so well as thriller master Robert Ludlum.

I'm talking, of course, about Ludlum's masterwork, The Bourne Identity. And yes, I am well aware that Ludlum's novel has long since been adapted into a rightly well-regarded series of thriller films starring Matt Damon and Brian Cox. If you haven't seen these films, I urge you to do so. They are incredibly well-done.

And yet, if you haven't read the source material, Ludlum's original novel...even if you have seen the movies based on it, I strongly urge you to give the book a chance. There are so many differences between book and movies, and I don't want to spoil them, so I'll just close with a phrase that Ludlum used (to vastly greater effect) as his own earlier version of Brown's "very sorry":

"Cain is for Carlos, and Delta is for Cain."

How about you? Favorite works of fiction that play around with memory? Challenges you have faced trying to play around with memory in your own work? Let us hear from you in the comments section!

See you in two weeks!

The Lost World

If you subscribe to the New Yorker – as indeed you should, in these scoundrelly times, because it provides clarity and purpose, and restores some small threshold of grace to our debased coinage – you happen on unexpected rewards.  This year just past was their 100^th anniversary, and their archive yields some hauntingly authentic stuff, not least their portraits of a vanished history, a history which was everyday back then, but which can seem to us almost an archeology.  They ran one a couple of weeks ago, S.N. Behrman’s profile of the prewar art dealer Joseph Duveen, a genteel hustler with an appetite for grand gestures.

Duveen was himself a fascinating character, and he cultivated a celebrated circle of clients and contacts, John D. Rockefeller, the Armenian oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian, the émigré Russian prince Felix Youssoupoff – one of the conspirators who murdered Rasputin.  My initial interest, though, was less about the specifics, and more about the atmosphere, the climate of the rich and entitled. 

I’ve written a number of period mystery stories set in New York in the late 1940’s, featuring a leg-breaker for the Irish mob named Mickey Counihan.  (A recent Mickey story, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” appeared in the SleuthSayers anthology Murder, Neat.)  I thought maybe art fraud, as the hook for a story – shades of Lovejoy – or hovering in the background, the cultural pretensions of American robber barons, used as leverage, in some way.  I don’t mean, by the by, that Duveen was a swindler; he had a sharp eye for art, and his taste ran ahead of his buyers, his skill was knowing how to put the right piece of art in the sight line of a guy like Rockefeller, and make it necessary for John D. to own.  In the context of a Mickey story, I was thinking more along the lines of how you might probe the weakness in a Rockefeller, would vanity get the better of him?  Could you set somebody like that up, if you put them in competition with another tycoon like J.P. Morgan, or Frick, or Mellon?  Suppose they were in a bidding war for a Fabergé egg, or a Gainsborough oil.

In other words, I didn’t know.  I had no idea how to use this, it was just floating around in the zeitgeist.  In the meantime, though, reading about Duveen, his lifestyle, his tastes, his indulgences, you get a terrific sense of this lost world, up where the steaks are thick and the air is thin.  These are not people who drink jug wine.  At the same time, for all their self-confidence, they harbor doubts, the Dürer, the Gainsborough, not so much that they might be cheated, but that they might be buying in when the fashion has already passed them by. 

This is a very interesting kind of one-upsmanship, or fear of missing out, or cultural insecurity.  You know you could do something with it.  Henry James, eat your heart out. 

As so often, it isn’t the thing itself.  It isn’t the missing drug money, or the Fabergé egg, or the fact that Rasputin just won’t stay dead, no matter the poison, or the bullet wounds, or sewing him into a bag full of rocks and dumping him in the frozen Neva.  It’s whether Prince Youssoupoff is going to keep his wits about him, or come unglued.  In other words, as Hitchcock says, the object isn’t interesting; what’s compelling is that everybody’s so invested in the object. 

I can’t tell you how this story comes out.  I can’t even tell you how it begins.  It’s no more than a whisper.  I’ll let you know when it comes in earshot.

Genius

 

Today’s blog may end up sounding like a graduation speech. Blame the research. As frequently happens, while looking for something else, I ran across a fact that distracted me. The result of this detour was that…

We can all lay claim to genius.

The word “genius” has its roots in ancient Latin. The Romans believed that a deity or spirit watched over each person. Sometimes a spirit also protected a particular place, usually the family residence. In my mind, I picture a beneficent Dobby the house elf. I think it’s more accurate to the word origins, however, to equate the deity with what many refer to as their guardian angel. Because the connection between spirit and individual began at a person’s birth, it was called a “genius,” from the Latin verb gignere, meaning ‘to give birth or bring forth’. We more commonly see this Latin root of beginning in words like “genesis” and “genetic”.

The “genius” guided individuals to live into their destiny, be that common or exalted. Of course, we mostly have references to those who were led to greatness.

In the 18th Century, the word "genius" took on its contemporary meaning. Genius, with its divine element, got conflated with ingenium, a related Latin word for innate talent. A natural, god-given talent became our word, genius.

With the publication of The Devil’s Kitchen and The Hidden River last year, book clubs occasionally invite me to come talk to them. Invariably, there are questions from readers about how to write a book. Never forget you’re a genius, I tell them. It’s a line that plays well with listeners. I then explain the classical roots. The etymology suggests that we all have a unique nature. I encourage them to tell their story, tapping into that perspective. They don’t need to set a book in a national park; that’s where my Dobby led me. Instead, they should go to that place where they are guided.

I hope the advice lands; it has personal resonance. A decade ago, I wrote a historical mystery. It was good enough to procure an agent, but it never found a home. While the book was being shopped, my agent recommended that I write another book. This is, I believe, the agent’s answer to all life’s problems—write another book. The one she proposed had several market-driven elements. I wrote it, but I don’t know that my heart was ever in it. Perhaps that was reflected in the prose. To paraphrase David Hume, it fell dead-born, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur…”

In the interim between submission and ultimate surrender, I wrote the draft of a book that eventually became The Devil’s Kitchen. It was a story I wanted to tell, possibly felt destined to write. The writing was more fun and the results more satisfying. Me and my genius and I got the job done.

The satisfying feeling of writing the story you want to tell suggests another derivation from that old Latin root. ‘Genial’, the word meaning friendly or cheerful, arises from that innate or inborn sense of genius.

If  you’ve set a writing goal as a New Year’s resolution, I hope you’re still working toward it. Remember you’re a genius. Go toward that innate destiny, and may it make you cheerful.

Until next time.

Everyday people.

I was watching a Brit Box police procedural, one of my favorite pastimes, when something jolted me.  One of the characters was the manager on a construction site, and he was portrayed as sort of dimwitted and comically inept.  I still liked the show, and hope they renew it in the future, but the moment reminded me of my strong bias against stereotypes, which I think can be a form of pernicious, soft bigotry.

            Some of my best friends have been construction managers, and let me assure you, they are anything but dimwitted.  It’s impossible; the job is much too demanding and complex.  But scriptwriters often believe everyone shares their casual prejudices, most obviously toward so-called working-class people, or anyone who wears a company uniform or lives outside an urban zip code.  This predisposition isn’t just about lower social status.  As soon as a wealthy businessperson shows up on the scene, you know he or she is a villain.  That’s their theatrical responsibility. I’ve known a lot of these people as well, and I’d only call a few avaricious sociopaths (names withheld to protect the innocent, namely me.)

                Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy for writers to be trapped by stereotypes.  It’s partly a matter of efficiency – to telegraph the nature of a particular character without a lot of description, tapping into preconceptions.  But it’s also human nature to let lazy assumptions slip out of our jumbled unconscious and creep into the work.  

                There’s a creative consultant in the advertising world named Tom Monahan who has a simple solution.  He would advise us to sketch out a character as they first present themselves, then turn the dial 180 degrees.  I loved that idea, and quite intentionally applied it in fiction.

 

            It led me to make the most benign ensemble player in one of my series an old-money billionaire.  One of my librarians was a card-counting kleptomaniac.  A CPA was a handsome playboy.  And naturally, my protagonist is a cabinetmaker.  In an earlier iteration, he was a corporate executive, and before that a championship boxer.  If anyone asked if that was realistic, I’d say I once knew one.  My grandfather.

            I’m not the only one who likes to do this.  In fact, I feel that mystery and thriller writers tend to upend stereotypes as a matter of course.  It’s another way to inject surprise and uncertainty into the narrative.  It’s part of our unifying philosophy that nothing is ever quite what it seems.  And what’s better than sliding in a little social commentary under the radar?

            To be fair to the arts, we’ve come a long way from when representations were all color coded, so to speak, and we're better for it.  One of the last to fall has been portrayals of the disabled.  When a character shows up in a wheelchair (my mother used one of those), I’m always tense until, at the end, they’re just another player in the drama who happens to be paralyzed from the waist down.  Characters with autism (a condition shared by one of my grand children - I have a family full of steroetypes) are starting to demonstrate that a different sort of brain can actually confer special abilities. 

              I appreciate another Brit Box show, Code of Silence, where the deaf protagonist’s skill as a lip reader is the central superpower underlying the concept.  Though aside from that, she’s just a regular young woman trying to fumble her way through life’s indiscriminate abuses like the rest of us. 

            In the aforementioned British show with the foolish construction manager, one of his crew, a seemingly loutish lad, turns out to be the evil genius behind the crime.  For me, all was redeemed, though on further thought, was the boss a fool because he was in construction, or because he was a manager? 

Crime Scene Comix Case 2026-02-037, Man's Best Friend

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

The Long Walk

 

I like Stephen King. I've read all his writings--novels, novellas, short stories, even the essays and other nonfiction--and I think I have every piece of fiction he's written, right here on the shelves of my home office, except for a couple of special collectors' editions that would probably cost as much as my house. Admittedly, there are a few of his novels--Rose Madder, Cell, Dreamcatcher, etc.--that didn't exactly blow up my skirt, but overall I like just about everything he's had published. My favorite novels are probably The Stand, It, 11/22/63, The Dead Zone, The Green Mile, and Misery; favorite novellas are The Body, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Riding the Bullet, and The Mist; and favorite shorts are "The Last Rung on the Ladder," "The Raft," "The Night Flier," and "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut." 

What I didn't enjoy much were some of the movie and TV adaptations of Stephen King's work. The best ones, to me, were those made from his novellas, like Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Mist--but some of the movies, especially the ones done long ago, didn't work well for me. 

Because I did like some of the more recent adaptations, I found myself looking forward to the fairly-new film version of The Long Walk, from the novel of the same name that was originally published as part of a four-novel collection called The Bachman Books. I bought it in hardcover when it was first released, and before it was officially revealed that Richard Bachman was actually Stephen King. My point is, I enjoyed the novel and I hoped the screen version would be as good.

It was. I wound up watching it last week, on DVD. The ending was a little different from the novel's, but the rest was pretty faithful to the original, and boy was it entertaining. I should mention here, though, that this movie isn't for everyone--it's not only ultra-depressing, it's ultra-violent. But, like the Hunger Games trilogy and other dystopian movies, it's supposed to be violent. In fact, it bears a close resemblance to The Hunger Games for another reason: it's about kids competing to the death in pursuit of vast fame and riches. 

The plot, in a nutshell, is that once a year, fifty teenaged boys--one from each state in the U.S.--are selected to walk together, in a group, under the watchful eye of armed overseers, until only one boy is left standing. If any walker's speed falls below three miles per hour, anytime and for any reason, that person is given three warnings and then executed, on the spot. Contestants are also executed if they stray off the surface of the road. So it's "walk or die," and the competition goes on as long as the boys can last; there is no time limit and no finish line. The winner, who is then given a cash prize and granted any wish he cares to make, succeeds only because he's the last one left alive.

It's an interesting--and terrifying--idea, and one of the points the movie tries to make is that there's always the possibility that the world we currently live in could one day devolve into one that allows this kind of thing.

What really makes this film work, I think (besides the great premise), is the relationship that develops between some of the fifty boys. And that works because of the people they cast in those roles. To me, these kids were completely believable, and I wound up so involved in the story that I caught myself nodding in rhythm to their walking pace during almost the whole thing. Adding to the fascination was a piece of inside info: In order to film the movie, the crew had to stay constantly on the move for the entire shoot. There was no "one" location--they had to physically change all the camera setups every few minutes and every couple of miles. It must've been a herculean effort; I think it's probably the only movie I've ever seen that was filmed this way.

Two things about the casting deserve special mention. One was that the main character was portrayed by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman--and the son was fantastic in this movie. (It's spooky how much he looks like his dad.) The second thing is that the role of the main overseer, a cruel commander only referred to as The Major, went to--of all people--Mark Hamill. It felt a bit strange to see superhero Luke Skywalker as the sole villain. But it worked.

So that's my take, on this. Have any of you seen this movie? Have you read the novel, probably long ago? If so, what are your thoughts? What did you like about the movie, or not like? Should I end my newly-found career as film critic? How about Stephen King adaptations? Did you like most of them?

Inquiring minds want to know.