![]() His professed goal was to climb down from journalistic detachment and actually participate in the world he was describing. As television was bringing sports and a smattering of culture into everyone’s living room with an unprecedented immediacy, Plimpton cast himself as the everyman of public experience. It’s an intriguing and emblematic story.īeside his 50-year shepherding of The Paris Review, with its outstanding record in publishing new fiction and its interviews with often elusive and reclusive writers, Plimpton was famous in his day for a series of books, articles, and television shows that recounted his adventures as an amateur trespassing in the worlds of professionals. The new documentary Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself tries and to a certain extent succeeds in capturing something of his unique place in the mix, his achievements, and the tantalizing blend of highbrow and populist in his nature. ![]() Into this world that valued youth and rough experience came a patrician New England WASP named George Plimpton, who became the first editor of The Paris Review in 1953 and a dabbler in virtually everything - or at least everything with an audience. (Today, it would probably list what writing programs gave him or her an MFA.) The total mobilization of World War II had also ignited the quest for the Great American novel, and the flyleaf biographies on new fiction often listed a writers’ bona fides - a working stiff’s sampler of the American scene: fire spotter in Idaho, lobster fisherman in Maine, short order cook in Mississippi, valet car parker in Los Angeles. Salinger, for one, longed to be part of, and then beat a hasty retreat from, when it arrived in the form of rabid fans on his doorstep. Lorenz Hart’s Manhattan was “an isle of joy,” Comden and Green’s “a helluva town.” But the postwar atmosphere was more succinctly captured a decade or so later by Kander and Ebb: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” It was the world that J. And in no place was the competition more intense, the arena so significant, than in New York City. In an era when Life magazine anointed Jackson Pollack as the great American artist and Hemingway as the great American writer, the young men (especially) who came out of the war - Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, and so many more - all wanted to make their own marks on this newly enhanced world of fame and celebrity. As Jack Kerouac wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” - and he was not alone. The degree of failure or success was somewhat less important than making an unforgettable impression. Whether it was the ostentatious physical risks of Hemingway the bullfighter and white hunter, or the guttered candle of Fitzgerald in Hollywood, this new American writer not only had to write, but to be, preferably in a flamboyant, self-dramatizing configuration of talent and nerve. It wasn’t enough any longer merely to achieve you had to be seen to achieve. ![]() ![]() As the model of the movie star became the decisive influence in literature as in so many fields, a lot more bells and whistles were added to the idea of the American writer. The intervening 60 or so years had seen another major shift. Long before, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells had documented the shift of national culture from Boston to New York. SOMETHING SPECIAL was brewing in the East Coast literary world after World War II. Written, produced and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself opened in New York on it will open in Los Angeles on June 7.
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