To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Cinephilia

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strangehamps. Today, Sina Filia, movie love. You know how sometimes you fall in love with a movie so much you watch it over and over again? Well, some movie fans take that devotion to a whole other level. For instance, remember the shining? Stanley Kubrick's creepy movie about a writer and his family at a haunted hotel. Are there ghosts and rivers of blood and then Jack Nichols and tries to kill everyone? It's pretty scary. What turns out there are some super fans who have watched the shining 20 or 30 times, even frame by frame, and they found what they believe are secret clues, messages, the Kubrick hid in the film. And now there's a movie about those obsessed fans. It's called Room 237, made by director Rodney Asher. New York Times Film Critic Manolla Dargus thinks it's kind of creepy and kind of fascinating. He talks to five different movie fans, all of whom have kind of far out ideas about the movie. It's a documentary, I would say, only in

quotation marks. In the sense that they're making all of this up with this material that they've watched, it's like we are so deep in movie land that inside the movie that we're watching Room 237, we never have a cutaway to some person like Jeffrey Cox, who's one of the people who has a very wild interpretation of the movie. You never cut away to see him speaking in, let's say, his living room. You know, there's no talking headshot of him sitting in an office in the real world. So for me, it's a kind of acknowledgement that the movie and everything that we're listening to has no reference in the real world. And since I'm trained as an historian and my special expertise is in the history of Germany and Nazi Germany in particular, they became more and more convinced that there is in this film a deeply laid subtext that takes on the Holocaust. I think it probably was the typewriter, which was a German brand,

which might seem arbitrary, but by that time I knew enough about Kubrick that most anything in his films can't be regarded as arbitrary. And so that struck me, why a German typewriter. He thinks this is a reference to the German bureaucratic killing machine or what else? The number 42 keeps showing up on sweatshirts, or he actually counted the number of times Jack's wife, Wendy, swings the bat at Jack Nicholson, and it's 42 times, which he thinks is a reference to 1942. Yes, the film historian David Bourdwell has a really useful term that I like. He says that one of the things that critics do is that they create model films. And what they basically are doing is they're reconstructing the movie, making a mental model of the movie. But it's a very selective model because what they do is they emphasize certain details and deemphasize others or just

ignore other things. And so I think that of all of the different people who speak inside of Room 237 that Jeffrey Cox has the best and most plausible model film. And if you think about a little model ship, he's made a model film of the shining, a kind of a separate film that he has constructed from all of the cues and the patterns that he has picked out in the movie. But what that means is that he's ignoring a lot of the other stuff in the movie. And I think that's a really interesting thing because as I wrote, this is kind of movie criticism and it's most delirious. And for me, it's kind of interpretation gone wild, you know, criticism gone wild. You see something in a movie and you latch on to something that speaks to you personally. And then you kind of siphon all of that material and you go back with all that material and you start making a secondary, a shadow movie, a model movie that based on all of that material that's interesting to you. But in order to

do that, you have to ignore a lot of other things. What's astonishing to me is how deep people go. There's an entire interpretation about the moon landing. The carpeting on the floor during the famous Danny scene where he stands up with his Apollo 11 shirt, the patterns in the carpeting exactly match, Launchpad 39A, you know, even the driveway and everything. And if you notice in that shot, the pattern on the rug changes when Danny stands up. One of the reasons I wanted to go back to the shining is like, wait a minute, does the pattern on the rug really change? It really does. You know, when I see something like that in a movie, my default position is usually that's just a mistake. That's a continuity mistake. Exactly. That's a blooper. That's something that's going to show up on one of those internet websites. I don't then

therefore decide that it's a portal into an entire world of meaning. Well, one of the things that I think is so interesting about listening to these different interpretations is my take on it was, well, this is kind of weird, like a weirdly twisted version of what we all learn to do in college English classes, right? Yes. You're taught to read novels deeply and to look for images and symbols and to think about linking those up. Nobody ever suggested that the novelist did it on purpose. In some cases, novelists, of course, are conscious of the way they're using symbols and images. But the assumption always is that there's a great deal that we do when we're creating something imaginary that we're not fully aware of. And that's the delight of interpretation. Yeah, I don't know. What do you think about in terms of this film? I think this is taking the intentionality to a point of madness almost, though I don't mean madness. I mean, it's kind of in a very playful way. There's nothing bad really about these interpretations. I think they're faulty. I think they're kind of silly at times. I think they're foolish. No harm was done.

It's fine. What I think it's interesting is movies teach us how to watch them to a certain extent. They're all sorts of ways in which they cheat time and space. And we learn just by watching movies how to read them through editing, for instance. A lot of movies won't show you someone walking up to a door, opening the door, walking through the door, closing the door. You'll just have a cut from someone in the hallway to suddenly they're in the room. And what we do is that we understand that that person has gone through the door. Movies, they cheat that because they only often have two hours if we're lucky to make their meaning. So they're compressing time and space. So there's a lot of cheating and we learn how to do that. What's interesting is that for some viewers, it's not enough what the movie is telling us. And I think that that's really important. The movies tell us a lot of things. There's a lot happening on screen. And I think one of the problems with just mainstream criticism often is that we're not looking at what is there, the visible evidence as it were. We're not just paying attention to what's on screen. We're looking kind of casually at the movies and then just running off. And some of

this is understandable. I mean, most movie critics are still just watching a movie, let's say, just once. Unlike these fans in Room 237, when I review a movie, I'm usually going to a screen in the dining room. I watch the movie once and then I have to go home and I have to create my mental model of the movie. I have to summon it up. Look at my little chicken scratch notes and try to remember what in the world was I writing in the dark and imagine it. But I'm trying to understand what I saw. I'm trying not to take these great imaginative leaps because I think that we do a disservice sometimes to the movie. And so I find these interpretations amusing, I think particularly because I am a movie critic. I also find myself frustrated when I see other people doing that when they're writing about a movie. What this movie really is about, rotations around really is about. We saw that recently with Gone Girl, people not just looking at Gone Girl as for what it is, but saying what it really is about. And on the other hand, there's something kind of beautiful about the way these fans, the attention that they bring

to the smallest details and the smallest images in the film, one of these fans is ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore and he reads The Shining as mainly about the Native American genocide. And one of his big pieces of evidence is that there's a Calumet baking powder can. And I think my visual imagination looked at that Calumet baking powder can, the one right behind Halloween said when he's talking to Danny. I knew what Calumet meant, it meant peace pipe. And I thought to myself peace pipe Indians, oh my goodness, they're all over the place in that movie. I would never have even noticed that baking powder can or the fact that later you see even more baking powder cans than I kind of like having noticed that. Oh, I think it's great. I only get irritated, I think, with other professionals when they take these kind of leap sometimes. What I'm saying is when they're not actually paying attention to what's on screen, I think why I

did love this movie, Room 237 and why I think of it as delirious is the playfulness. And it is, I agree. I think there's something quite beautiful. I love that they're looking at the details. I think fundamentally it says more about Bill Blakemore than it does about Kubrick. I would argue. I don't actually think that it's about the genocide, the kind of confidence with which he puts forth this interpretation is really quite a lovely thing. But I think that's because I think fan love, unless it's demented, is quite lovely oftentimes. And there's something about Kubrick that just brings out this kind of devotion, I think as a testimony to Kubrick himself. Manela Dargas is co -chief film critic for The New York Times. The film is Room 237, just out on DVD. And if you want to watch it, Manela actually suggests a triple feature, watch The Shining, then Room 237, then watch The Shining again,

just not before bed. So who's your favorite filmmaker, or at least a filmmaker you're obsessed with? Steve Paulson would put Werner Herzog near the top of his list, Herzog's the legendary German director who made art house classics like Aguirre, The Wrath of God, and Fitzgerald though, as well as hit documentaries like Grizzly Man. He makes movies on kind of an epic scale. The late Roger Ebert memorably said even his failures are spectacular. Herzog has just come out with a book about his life and philosophy called A Guide for the Perplexed. And Steve, of course, had questions. Mr. Herzog, I want to start by asking you about your 1972 film Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Did you actually threaten to shoot your lead actor, Klaus Kinski, at one point during the production? I did, yes. But there was a clear understanding between us. The production was very, very complicated, and we actually had a very small crew in the middle of the jungle, something like ten or eleven days before the end of shooting here, because

a sound assistant smiled, and he screamed at me. This pig has smiled at me, and I had to dismiss him. I said, the entire crew is going to live in solidarity, and he packed his stuff into a boat and was leaving, and I said to him, Klaus, I have your rifle. I had to confiscate it, because a few days before some of the extras were playing cards after shooting. They were playing cards, and they laughed, and they had a beer. And he was annoyed by this and shot three shots through their huts, but the walls were only thin bamboo walls, and forty of them were packed into this small hut, that he didn't kill anyone. It's a miracle. He only shot half a finger away from one of the extras, and I said to him, Klaus, you are not going to leave. There's something bigger than the two

of us, and he screamed and yelled, you will see how I'm going to leave, and I said to him, if you do that, you will just barely reach the next bend of the river, and you will have quite a few bullets in your head. And he knew I was not choking. Are you serious? I mean, would you have shot him if you had gotten on that boat to get away? Let's not get into that, but at least I voiced it. And at that time, I think I was serious, otherwise he wouldn't have. All of us hadn't screamed for police to protect him against this mad man, but I was very calm. I was very, very calm, soft voice, I explained to him that this was not going to happen. But of course, you will read everywhere on the internet from then on, I directed him from behind the camera with a rifle pointed at him, and all this kind of thing. Let it blossom. Yes, that sounds fine. To skip ahead, then, a few years at Yulin Kinsky, we're once again in Amazon, filming Fitzgerald another incredibly difficult project.

And this is another film about obsession. And the centerpiece of the film is dragging a 340 ton steamboat up a mountain. Over a mountain. Over a mountain, up and over a mountain. And the big question is, why did you think that you literally had to drag that ship over a mountain? I mean, you could have created that effect on film, and that's kind of what movies do. They create illusions, but you dragged that ship over the mountain. At that time when the film was made, there were no digital effects. So let's face it. But of course, there were possibilities with a miniature boat over a mountain. But how do you miniaturize the trees of the jungle? So that's a tricky thing. How do you miniaturize movement waves of water? That's very, very hard to do. But that was not the real issue. For me, it was something more fundamental. I wanted to have audiences back in a position where they could trust their eyes again. And it's a

monumental task, and you will never see anything like this in a film, because today they all do it with a digital effect. But moving a real ship over a real mountain, created so many lively elements and moments that I captured on film that you couldn't even invent. For example, the sound, when we started to drag the ship, and there were still hausers, cables, and pulley systems around the hull of the boat, and the kind of groaning of the boat, and the sounds of the boat is something you will never, ever be able to invent. It's just phenomenal. So the film became very rich in texture, and I knew that. What's that? One of the things that is so extraordinary about your career, and I can't really think of any other filmmaker like this, you have done both feature films and documentaries, I mean, at the highest levels. It shouldn't give you a sleepless night, because when you look at writers, for example,

why is it I don't want to compare myself, but it's just name him Shakespeare. Why does he write dramas, and why does he write sonnets? Or why is a writer writing a novel and poetry? There's nothing special about that. But it would seem that these are two very different things. I mean, one would presume that documentaries are grounded in the imperative to talk about real things, and feature films are dealing with fiction. No, I do not accept your definition, because that's what you see day in day out on HBO and PBS. It's a form of journalism. You're talking about a form of journalism. I think documentaries have to divorce themselves from journalism. Errol Morris is doing it. Less blank did it. I'm doing it, and I think my basic approach is facts do not constitute truth. That's a common mistake. They don't. Otherwise, the phone directory of Manhattan,

four million entries, would be the book of books. It would be scripture, and it is not. So I'm looking after something that is only partially based, in fact, but I stylize. I invent. I script. I write some of the scenes. I do everything that goes much closer towards, let's say, feature film making. Are you in pursuit of truth? In your documentary. In a way, yes, but you have to be very cautious about it, because neither mathematicians or philosophers could really define what it is. But we all have this sense in us. What I'm trying is to move towards in this direction. And truth is something which has to illuminate you. There are moments of almost ecstasy where you step out of yourself and you immediately sense there's something very, very big, and it becomes part of yourself. And I have coined the term the ecstasy of truth, the ecstatic

truth. Have you had many personal experiences of this yourself, of these ecstatic moments of truth? Yes, of course. And I think everyone has these moments. When you read a great poem, you instantly know, you don't have to analyze it, or being confronted with a great painting. You just are completely awestruck, and you are transported somewhere, which is, as if you have lifted off the ground, and you are somewhere, and you are confronting this image. Or in music, great music, it has, not only can it illuminate you, it also has a quality that's particular about music. It can give you consolation. I'm interested in all the examples you've given are not about your own films that you make. No, but I'm trying to find these moments and I'm striving for a cinema that gives you this kind of illumination, at least once in a while, and also a sense of solitude that all of a sudden you don't feel

alone anymore. Now, I want to ask you about one documentary that you did. Everyone I know talks about. This is kind of obsessed about it. It's the story of Timothy Treadwell, who for years went to live with grizzly bears in Alaska, pretty much every summer until one summer when he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a grizzly. As a filmmaker, why did you want to tell that story? I had no idea about the events around Timothy Treadwell. I had never heard of him, and in the office of a producer who was very friendly with me and was very helpful. I paid him a courtesy visit and at the end of our conversation, I was looking at his messy table, looking for my car keys that I had misplaced. And he thought I was spotting something in particular and he shoves across an article about Timothy Treadwell and said, read it at home. I normally don't read this. I went home, read it. I was right back in the office because I had the feeling this was big. This was so big I had to do this.

And I somehow wrestled the whole project away from them and I did it together with them. But you can tell as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, you know it deep inside that you come across something that is truly big. And the film has had a lot of impact. Well, and Treadwell, I mean, he's this fascinating character. You admire him for what he did for the... I mean, he himself was a filmmaker. He shot amazing footage of the Grizzlies. Be warned. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. Thank you so much for letting me do this. Thank you so much for these animals for giving me a life. I had no life. No, I have a life. But you know there was something odd and probably off about him as well. I mean, he should not have gotten that close to the Grizzlies. Sure, yes. There are rules of behaviour in the native population, for example, in Kodiak Island. They respect the bear.

They don't love the bear, but they respect the boundaries. But Timothy Treadwell wanted to hug them and even touch their nose and sing songs to them. So there's something wrong, something awfully and tragically gone awry. Where the disneyization of wild nature ultimately cost him his life and unfortunately also his girlfriend's life, Amy Hoganard, who was with him. It's very, very tragic, a tragic sort of misunderstanding of philosophy and misunderstanding of wild nature. And of course, when you say, yeah, he was kind of unhinged and sometimes glorious. And so he had at least five, six, seven more facets, a very strange, colourful man with a lot of different sides in him. And I allow him to show all his sides, his glory, his dejection, his fears, his magnuminity, everything, everything,

madness, everything. Now one of the things that makes this film so poignant is it turned out that Timothy Treadwell's camera was on as he was getting killed. He and his girlfriend, I mean, the lens wasn't open, but the audio was going and there are six minutes of audio as he's getting mauled and eaten by the bear. And so the question for you is, what do you do with that? How do you deal with it morally? You can see it in the film. I had to address it because production company TV station which sponsored the film and the distributor. They all came to me and they said, you have to address it. It is known in public. Why don't you play it in the film? I said to them, I have no idea what's really on this tape. Let me listen to it and I'm going to film this moment. But I'm filmed only from behind. And you see the face of Joel Palovak, who was a companion and co -founder of Grizzly People and she inherited

all these tapes. And she tries to read from my face what I'm hearing and she starts, it's a very intense moment. She starts to cry and I listen to the tape. And the moment I listen to it, I knew this is not going to be in my film. Never ever, that's not going to happen. Can you turn it off? Truly, you must never listen to this. I know for her, I'm never going to. And you must never look at the photos that I've seen at the coroner's office. I will never look at them. Yeah. They said it would be. Now you know why, no one's going to hear it.

I think you should not keep it, you should destroy it. Yeah. I think that's what you should do. Because it will be the white elephant in your room, all your life. It's the same thing, why do we not show in public on television after the 9 -11 attacks? 200 people jumping out of the towers to their death. Some of them in close -ups crashing to the ground in front of a camera. There's a dignity to one's individual's death and a privacy. You will never ever show this in public. And the similar thing, you have to respect the death of these two persons. And it is so terrifying, by the way, it's so terrifying what I heard, that certain things you do not put out to an anonymous audience. You just don't. And there's a clear line and I said, only over my dead body, this is going to end up in the film and they understood it. But you felt like you

had to listen yourself. Well, I was pushed to end. And yes, there was a certain curiosity. And I can say one or two things on the tape. You hear Timothy Treadwell in the distance screaming. And apparently Amy Hoganard as petite woman who was from moment one afraid of grizzly bears. She apparently grabbed a frying pan, rushed out and hit the bear with his frying pan over the head. And at the place where some of her remains were found, there was also the frying pan. This is real heroism. She lost her life, but she lost it as a true genuine authentic hero. You still think a lot about Timothy Treadwell? He comes across me whenever I see an animal, a wild animal or whenever I see wilderness. He's always there.

Werner Herzog is a living legend among filmmakers. Steve Paulson talked with him after reading Herzog's new book, A Guide for the Perplexed. Conversations with Paul Kronin. And hey, if you liked it, we post it Steve's longer conversation with Herzog on our website. That's at ttbook .org. Coming up, what goes on inside the head of a man who wears a giant puppet head? We'll find out next. I'm Anne Strange -Hamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. One of the weirdest side notes in pop music history was an act called Frank Sidebottom Oblime Big Band. It was a British group, led by Chris Sevy, a man who was only ever seen on stage in a giant paper mache head. Kind of like a human cartoon hybrid. Writer John Ronson played

keyboards with the group for about three years in his 20s. And he tells his story about how he answered the phone one day. Some guy says, hey Frank Sidebottom's keyboard player is just canceled and they need someone to play tonight. John says, well, I play keyboards. And the guy says, then you're in. John says, but I don't know any of your songs. And there's a pause and then the guy gets back on the phone and he says, well, can you play C, F, and G? John tells what happens next in a book, a new movie, and here with Doug Gordon. It was like a dark room and I knew that he wore a big fake head. And so I saw these men staring at me and I wondered, you know, if I looked closely, would I be able to see which one was frank? Would there be some kind of facial indication that this is the man who always wears the fake head? Yeah. And they were like fiddling with equipment at the front near the stage. And then I looked to my right and I noticed this other figure in the shadows staring at me with these huge eyes painted onto a giant fake head. He was wearing the fake head even though there was nobody in the room except for his own band who

surely had seen him without the head on. So immediately I thought, I think what does he never take it on? Is he like possessed? So I knew his real name was Chris. So I said, hi Chris, I'm John. And just silence. So I said, hello, Frank. And he went, hello. And then his manager came over and said, can you teach John the songs? So he turned away from me as if kind of shyly undressing and removed the head and removed some weird messily contraption that was underneath the head. And then turned and gave me the sort of apologetic smile as if to say, you know, I'm sorry that you had to witness such oddness. But that's just the way things are in my world. And he taught me the songs and he was just normal looking underneath. Just a nice normal looking man. And then the audience arrived and I was on stage with a band. Love, a love melt in his heart. I think you know it well. You know it well. It should really well.

And it was extraordinary. There was 300 people in the audience and they just loved it. And I loved it. And I felt like Alice chasing the white rabbit down the hole. Did Frank introduce the band members? Yeah. So it was a kind of odd moment because Frank said, you know, I'd like to introduce the band. Drone sister. Vista Mike Doherty. And everybody kind of cheered. And Angata, Rick Sarko, everyone cheered in the sound of keyboards. And there was a much less vociferous cheer just a smattering of slightly confused applause. And I thought I haven't done anything wrong. And yet there's 300 people in this room who have all seem to have formed this collective negative judgment of me that I don't deserve as much applause as the other band members. And then I understood that, concerned that I didn't know any of the songs, they'd put me so far to the side of the stage and turn my keyboard so quiet, that 90

% of the audience didn't even know there was a keyboard player on stage. So I thought, well, why do they even ask me to join? Yeah. Okay. So tell me about the man under the head of Frank sidebar and Chris. Chris Seevy. He was a punk singer who never really had any hits. He had one actually two minor punk hits. And then one day he just had this strange U -turn into Frank sidebar. So we created this character and an entire world for this character. He'd be up all night building Frank things in his shed, so little models. There was little Frank his puppet and then little Denise, who was little Frank's girlfriend. If you're the sort of person who admires the idea of like putting in an awful lot of work, but at the same time really aiming low and really being marginal, then Frank's the person for you because he dedicated his life to this, but never had a big audience. How different was Chris

Seevy when he was himself versus when he was Frank? Chris was quite chaotic and hedonistic and prone to drink and drugs and Frank was like an innocent child. It makes me suspect that all this happened for a reason that when you're inside a fake head and also when you're inside the character of an innocent child, it's just a more comfortable and safer place to be than without a fake head, chaotic, hedonistic whirlwind of a life. Yeah, he's just able to immerse himself in this alternate universe that he has control over. Yeah. No stress, no tax to pay, no disappointed wife that you've been out all night and you haven't told aware, Frank was a safe place to be. When did you leave Frank's band? I was fired in 1990 for tax reasons. He owed £30 ,000 tax, Chris did, not Frank. Yeah, in

Frank's world there was no such thing as tax. No, no such thing as income tax. I remember that he stood up in court, Chris, and the judge said, this is a very serious matter, have you considered a payment plan? And Chris said, would a pound a week suffice melod? No, it would not. So he fired us all and went solo. And that was it for 15 years. I moved back down to London and didn't hear a word for 15 years and then I was in the park with my little boy and my phone rang. And I said, hello, and this voice went, hello. And I said, Frank. And he said, oh, yes. And I said, how are you? He said, oh, I'm very well. And I said, Frank, will you put Chris on? And he went, hang on. And he said, hello, John. He'd retired, Frank, a number of years earlier and became an animator on a pingo. But he really missed Frank and wanted to bring him back from retirement. So I held my breath because I knew from watching the blues brothers what was going to happen next. It didn't happen. And steady said, will you

write something about your time in the band to help me with my comeback? So I got home and it all just sort of flooded out of me this piece for the Guardian. And then at the time, one of my books, The Menestare Goats, was being turned into a film. So I was spending a lot of time with the screenwriter Peter Straun and when he read my piece, he said to me something kind of weird. He said, all my life, I've wanted to write a film about what would it have been like if Captain Beefheart had been around in the 1940s, like a man out of time. He said, but your idea is better. And he meant the idea of a man with a big fake head. And turning that into a film. So how did you go about doing that? You co -wrote it with Peter. Yeah, it's fictionalized. It's not a documentary per se. You had to make some creative changes to the story, right? Yeah, I think we started by making two big changes. One was that I didn't really want to write about a comedy band. I wanted to change the music. I should say all this was very much with Chris's blessing. He didn't really want that to be a character based on Chris in the film. So that really gave us permission to say, well, okay, what would

be the perfect way of telling this story? Chris never took himself that seriously, even though he was up all night for months building these meticulous, frank things. If everything went wrong and it was chaos, he would purport to love it when things went wrong. And we thought, wouldn't it be better if our frank and his band took themselves much more seriously, almost like craft work, like a sort of craft rock, our funk -guard band? Yeah. So that would raise the stakes a lot. And so we made that change. And then we started to say, well, what if our frank never takes his head off? Why would that be? And also how? How can he live underneath the vacate you entire life? And then we started to think about other great outsider artists, particularly Daniel Johnson, who I'm an enormous fan of. Yeah. And so we started thinking of our frank as like a mash -up of Daniel Johnson and Frank side bottom and Captain B -Fart. Have you ever tried on the Frank head, John? Yeah. And also I've tried on the movie Frank head. There was a New York Premier and Michael

Fassbender was there and let me try on the fake head. So I've tried on both the real head and the fake head. And I've got to tell you, it feels great in there. I was at Halloween party last year, which was full of quite famous people. And I wore a mask. And I realised that if I kept the mask on all night, it would eliminate all social anxiety. And I rather wish it was socially acceptable to wear fake heads quite a lot. It would make my life a lot easier. Unfortunately violent criminals have spoiled. Yes, they've kind of taken that away from us. But maybe if enough of us band together and with the success of the film in your book, maybe if we all start wearing frank heads, maybe we could make it socially acceptable. What did the help of I said my facial expressions out loud, welcoming smile? Delighted look. And what goes on inside the head, inside that head? Right, people should know about you. You should be famous. Flat or green, followed by a bashful half smile. Stop saying your facial expressions out loud is extremely annoying. Here it is, my most likable song ever. Coca -Cola lipstick ring, go dance on night, dance on night. Kiss me, just kiss

me, kiss me never die, D. This is your most likable song ever. People will love it. That's a clip from Frank, a film inspired by writer John Ronson's experience as a member of Frank's side -bottoms band during the late 1980s. Ronson's the author of Frank, the true story that inspired the movie. He talked with Doug Gordon. And coming up, November is national novel writing month. You get 30 days to write 50 ,000 words. Young adult author Scott Westerfeld tells us why it's great. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge, from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. And now, found films, movies you might have missed. I'm John Walters, the author of the new book, CarSec. And the most obscure movie that I always push is my favorite movie in the world, is the incredibly failed art film, Boom, directed by Joseph Losey, starring Elizabeth Taylor and

Richard Burton. Don't reach for a smoke. Wait till I offer you one. I have one. Written by Tennessee Williams. Everybody hated that movie so much that right before it came out, they changed the title. They just didn't know how to market it. So they added an exclamation point. So actually, the name of the movie is Boom. Not Boom. And so I used to always call the theater and say, what time is Boom playing? Just to hear if they would respond and say, boom, it's really good. So every time I think of the movie, I try to say it the same way it was written in a pitiful attempt to make money. She's sissy go for it, the richest woman in the world about to die. And he's Christopher Marlow, the angel of death, who has the unfortunate habit of calling on rich women right before they die. In the 60s, and Teresa Blosey said that he was the first director to ever lose money on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. And from that movie on, all their movies cost money. Not since Kat on a hot tin roof as Tennessee Williams created such raw passions,

such startling striking characters, devoid of all hypocrisy and inhibitions. Is this a time for kissing? Not since who's afraid of Virginia Woolf have Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton been so emotionally explosive. This just lies, but malicious distortion. That's not true. He was in your bedroom by invitation. She was rich, demanding. Shameless, domineering, but in the depths of her soul, as frightened as any one of us. Die! Mrs. Gausson! Don't move! He walked the vague lie in between lust and saintliness. I get panicky when I... I have nobody to care for. Is that so? You seem to be setting yourself up as a saint of something. I saw a boom with divine. We loved it, and it was a failed movie. There was about three people in the theater. It got terrible reviews. She had used her body

as a stepping stone to wealth and domination. Now she wanted this stranger. Could she take him on his terms? How many times do you have to be invited into a lady's bedroom? There's a big influence on pink flamingos because in pink flamingos, in the beginning, divine is in the trailer writing her memoirs, and that's what Elizabeth Taylor is doing as she goes for it. In the beginning of boom, she's writing her memoirs about being the richest, most fabulous person alive. That's John Waters, found film. For interviews with Waters, check our website at ttbook .org. It's November, and that means National Novel Writing Month. That time of year, when thousands of people commit to writing about 1 ,500 words a day, every day, no matter what, for a month. It's kind of like boot camp for would -be writers. Novelist Scott Westerfeld is a big supporter. He's a

star in the world of young adult fiction. The author of popular series like Peeps and Uglies, and his latest book, called Afterworlds, is about a teenage girl who takes part in National Novel Writing Month, but actually this is not just one book, it's two. One is about Darcy Patel. She is a young writer who basically wrote a novel in her senior year in high school, and somewhat unexpectedly had it published, and for a huge amount of money for her, so she's decided to defer a college for a year, rewrite the novel, and hang out with thinly veiled characters of me and my friends in New York. The novel she's written, which is included in its entirety, is about another young woman, Lizzie Scofield, who is involved in a terrorist attack while changing planes in Dallas -Fort Worth Airport. Basically, there's a bunch of gunmen who come in and start killing people, and her only record, there's only way to escape, is to play dead. And she winds up playing dead too well, and finds

herself transported into a sort of Afterworld plane, and after that experience, she can see ghosts. She starts to get these sort of gnarly psychopomp powers, she becomes a soul guide. Wait, psychopomp? Right. Psychopomp is a word meaning a soul guide. And it's such a great word I decided to use it for this book, and I forget that other people have not heard it perhaps. We also get this inside glimpse of YA young adult publishing by following Darcy. How accurate is that? About 93 % of the incidents that I describe are actually things that have happened to me and my friends. So there really is a YA drinks night that happens in Manhattan somewhere? Yes, it's reaching its 10th anniversary, actually. So for almost 10 years now, us YA writers have been meeting monthly to plot the poisoning of America's teenager's minds. Just like you'd think we would. The Latter -day Algonquin Club or something. But you know, for people who follow YA fiction, I mean, they're probably drooling listening to this because you guys have all become celebrities. What's happened? It is pretty weird. When I

first started writing YA, my first book came out in 2004, and the teen section of the bookstore was a sleepy little non -entity next to the kids section. And the parts of the publishing company that published YA weren't a big deal, like nobody cared if they, you know, if they rose or fell. And now those are the engines of the greatest growth and the greatest profit. And that big stack of books at the front of the bookstore that sells the most copies and that keeps the lights on is most likely by either Susan Collins or John Green or Gail Foreman or Stephanie Meyer. Like over the last 10 years, it's the team books that are the profit centers for publishing and this sort of have kept everything alive. And that's been a really weird thing to see. Yeah, so you've got a whole theory about this, right? That places this explosion of young adult fiction in the larger context of what it means to be a teenager today and really this relatively new life stage, historically speaking, the young adult. Yeah, teenagers haven't existed for a very long actually. They, you know, a hundred years ago they were basically two stages of life. You were an infant and then you turned 12 or

13 and somebody shipped you off to the mine or the factory or to marriage or to, you know, the Navy. But, you know, starting about 150 years ago, we got child labor laws and then laws about not having child soldiers and then the marriage age started to go up. And as a result, we wound up with this third stage of life, this sort of middle period of adolescence which is still contested in a way. It's still, we're still trying to figure out, you know, how it works and what the rules should be, which is why the drinking age is different in every country and voting age changes and the ages at which you can have dangerous jobs or sign contracts or get married. All of that is sort of constantly being fiddled with because we don't really understand what it is to be a teenager yet. And the years that we consider the teenage years are now expanding. So, you know, we've seen a bunch of new neuroscience about the teenage brain or the young adult brain, not really maturing until at least the mid -20s, if not later. Yeah, and that, those numbers are reflected in the audience of the people who read YA as well.

You have lots of 20 -year -olds who keep reading YA after they get out of college and they still want those teen stories because that stage of life is so dramatic and vital in its full of firsts, like your first love and your first kiss and your first beer and your first meaningful betrayal and your first time you are betrayed, all of those dramatic things are going on and are still going on in our 20s. So, what does it say about me that I'm 54 and I read YA fiction? Well, that just proves that you have maintained brain plasticity and... You just call me a secret teenager. Exactly. Well, I mean, I do think that all of these characteristics that we associate with teenagers, rebellion and questioning authority and acquiring new skills and generating new language and slang and culture are all, you know, things that we should all be doing our entire lives. Well, there's another story about young adult fiction that I think is not talked about so much

and that's the explosion of young adult writing, not writing for young adults, but writing by young adults. I mean, maybe I just think this because I have two teenagers and I get a glimpse of their world, but this seems like a thing, is it? It's definitely the case that, as never before, teenagers use writing as a part of their literacy process. They tweet in character, they write fan fiction, they write their own novels. I would love to go back to the time of Ruformandus in a time machine in the 1950s and say, you know, I come from the future and what I come from... Let me tell you how teenagers turned out. They write book reports voluntarily on websites like Goodreads and so many people want to consume these amateur book reports by other teenagers that this is actually a viable business model. Don't you think we need to pause here to thank an entire generation of teachers? And additionally, perhaps, JK Rowling who made a certain series that meant that every couple years there were two weeks when there was one object that it was absolutely imperative to have in your hand and that object was a book.

We're coming up on November, which is also Nano -Rymo, National Novel Writing Month. I don't know how many of our listeners actually know about it have heard of it, but you and your wife was also a writer, have both been involved with this big supporters of it. How come? Well, Nano -Rymo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's a time when basically half a million people in the United States declare their intention to write a novel in November, writing more than 1600 words every day, exactly. So 50 ,000 words in a month. I just like Nano because it means a lot of people engage the novel as a form. And I just love the idea that of those half a million, at least a couple hundred thousand are teenagers or in their early 20s, and they are learning how to write novels and they're learning how novels are put together so they're becoming better readers as well as better writers. So what happens to go back to the novel you just finished writing?

How has Darcy changed from her experience of writing a novel? Well, to some extent, her revision process is taking place at the same time as she's growing up. She looked at this first draft that she wrote while she was a Calo 17 -year -old in high school and now as an experienced 18 -year -old who lives on her own and knows everything, she has to reconstruct that story and tell that story again. I mean, there's this funny thing that happens to me when I look at my first draft after I finish. I look at those first few chapters and they're really kind of embarrassing. They're like pictures of me in middle school. And it's because back then I didn't know anything about what I was writing. I didn't really understand the novel yet. Now that I'm at the end, I understand it. And I think that's something that we all experience in life as we look back at ourselves two months ago, ten years ago, sometimes even like ten minutes ago and we see how Calo we were and how we didn't understand and that recognition that you have to rewrite yourself that you have to revise yourself is part of growing up.

You keep writing stories about teenagers and you've been doing it for more than ten years now. You've written 18 novels. When you're 80, will it feel weird to still be writing about teenagers? I hope not. It's not weird by the time you're 51. I don't see why it would be any weirder when you were 86. But I'll let you know. Hopefully, you know, as long as people are still publishing me, I'm sure I'll still be writing something. Scott Westerfeld is the author of many young adult novels. He's latest, which is actually two novels in one, is called After Worlds. And hey, if you're interested in taking part in National Novel Writing Month, we'll post a link on our website. That's it for this hour, but there is always more online. And you can hear to the best of our knowledge whenever you want, if you sign up for the podcast. Visit our website and we'll tell you how. That's at ttbook .org. This hour was produced by Doug Gordon. The rest of the team includes Sarah Nicks, Raymond Tungacar, Craig Ealy, and Charles Monroe Kane. Music by Steve Mullen from Walk West Music,

Audio Wizardry, courtesy of Technical Director Carillo Owen. Our executive producer is Steve Paulson. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. Thanks for listening. P -R -I, Public Radio International.