 |
| Rip Torn and Norman Mailer in Maidstone |
Cast: Norman Mailer, Rip Torn, Ultra Violet, Buzz Farbar, Leo Garen, Joy Bang, Lee Cook, Beverly Bentley, Jean Campbell, Robert Gardiner. Screenplay: Norman Mailer. Cinematography: Nick Doob, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker. Nicholas J. Proferes, Sheldon Rocklin, Diane Rocklin, Flame Schon, Jan Welt. Film editing: Lana Jokel, Norman Mailer, Jan Welt.
Why has no one done a biopic of Norman Mailer yet? Or would it be redundant? He put so much of himself on paper and on film that maybe there's not much left to say about him. But he's a key figure in that pivotal era in American cultural and political history, roughly the span of time from the Kennedy assassination to the Nixon resignation. The stressors of that period are on full display in his movie Maidstone: the psychic wounds of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X; the rise of Black power; the emergence of feminism and the reaction against it. It's a mad, almost unwatchable film, that fortuitously contained its own climax: the fight between the brothers played by Mailer and Rip Torn, which was a real fight between director and actor, the culmination of a five-day shoot at estates in East Hampton, New York. Much of Maidstone was improvised, with a resulting 45 hours of footage, that Mailer and others eventually edited into an 119-minute movie. It's ostensibly about a film director who wants to be a presidential candidate, launching his campaign while casting and beginning to film a movie. But really it's about the obsessions of Norman Mailer, and you really have to be interested in that to justify the time spent watching it.
