MELVILLE HOUSE
by Sal Robinson
October 13, 2014
Though Hollywood regularly makes movies about writers, with regularly dicey results, it rarely turns its gaze to editors. Which is fair enough: since most movies about writers could safely be retitled “Frowning & Scribbling,” I understand why producers would be loath to back a movie that lacks even the scribbling part.
A newspaper or magazine editor will turn up from time to time, made momentarily dramatic by a deadline or a controversy: William Shawn (played by Nicholas Woodeson) cautiously trying to suggest edits to Arendt (Barbara Sukowa)’s articles on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker in last year’s “Hannah Arendt” was a recent instance.
But book editors don’t get much screen time. With one notable upcoming exception: filming is underway on “Genius,” a movie based on A. Scott Berg’s biography of the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, Editor of Genius.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the movie, directed by British theater director Michael Grandage, “will chart the real-life relationship between literary giant Thomas Wolfe and renowned editor Max Perkins, who developed a tender, complex friendship that changed the lives of both men forever.” Wolfe will be played by Jude Law (after Michael Fassbender dropped out) and the role of Perkins has been taken by Colin Firth.
Perkins, who had discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, received a draft of Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (then called “O, Lost”) in 1928 and immediately recognized Wolfe’s talent, writing in his first letter to Wolfe that “it is a very remarkable thing, and no editor could read it without being excited by it and filled with admiration by many passages in it and sections of it” (quote from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell Perkins). This was just the start of one of the most famous 20th-century editorial tug-of-wars: Perkins would go on to cut 90,000 words from the book, and he had to wrestle Perkins hard to keep his next novel, Of Time and the River, at a manageable size.
