The Rumpus Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek
Danniel Schoonebeek discusses living a quiet life in the Catskills, the importance of travel, partying in the woods with poets, and how capitalism forces people to be cruel to each other.
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Posts Tagged: Hollywood
Not Even Rumi is Safe from Hollywood Whitewashing
One of the world’s most read and beloved poets since the 13th century, and an immensely important artistic, academic, and spiritual figure in the Muslim community, is getting his own movie. So who is going to take on the leading role of Rumi, whose poems about love, faith, and spirituality have guided generations? Academy Award-winning […]
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The Read Along: Omar Musa
In the second installment of The Read Along, Omar Musa shares how airplane delays can lead to productive reading sessions and how easy it is to get sucked into Internet wormholes about geodesic domes.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Service Area
Even though the summer customers were the worst, always impatient on their way west to the places of her dreams, she envied them.
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An Actress Recommends Five Classic Films to Her Child
Surprise is only one of many aspects of human behavior. There are dozens. Maybe even a hundred.
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The Rumpus Review of 10 Cloverfield Lane
To hell with alien attacks; cinematically speaking, Hollywood’s destroying itself just fine.
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The Slow Fall of the Hot Heroine
If nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws.
...moreBroadway-Blues-Bad Casting
Ever since Zoe Saldana was set to play Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic Nina, controversy has surrounded the casting choice. Writing in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates says that the issue isn’t just about Saldana’s lighter skin tone, but the erasure of Simone’s facial features and what it says about America’s racist beauty standards: Saldana […]
...moreAMA with the Original Six
In 1983 six Hollywood filmmakers sued Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures for practices that discriminated against women. Their story was recently profiled in Pacific Standard by Rachel Syme and these six women, known as the Original Six, will be hosting an AMA on Reddit today from 1-3pm ET.
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Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism
As an essayist who often writes from personal experience and who’s working on a memoir, I believe deeply it is a feminist act for women to tell their stories.
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#OscarsSoWhite: Calling Out Academy Bias
Instead of influencing our movie-going habits, The Academy can take its cues from us. We can continue to speak up through social media and—more importantly—our dollars.
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Anomalisa, the Insanity of Capitalism, and the Power of Culture
Our insane system: does it feel too risky to bring this up in the mainstream press?
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of The Martian
It is the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars for about a year, all by himself.
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Interview: David Ulin
Two long-time Angelenos walk and talk about that city, New York City, and how we experience urban life.
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The Rumpus Interview with Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy discusses his latest novel, The Dead Lands, why it’s all about keeping language fresh, and his dream job writing for DC Comics.
...moreIn Rainbows
The silver screen used to be a lot more colorful. Before Technicolor was an option, hand-painted black-and-white film produced vibrant, surreal images the likes of which the world had never seen. Joshua Yumibe looks into the invention born of necessity.
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The Rumpus Interview with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Producer Jeff Sommerville, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, and the cast of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl discuss their movie that went to Sundance and beyond.
...moreJoan Didion on White People
Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally. Years ago, Didion wrote about race […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Steph Cha
Steph Cha talks about her new novel, Beware Beware, writing compelling and complex Korean American characters, and what reading a book has in common with a level in a video game.
...moreBirdwatching
Over at Grantland, Mark Harris looks back on the stories Hollywood told this year, why marquee films are gridlocking the industry, and what that sort of thing can do to your head: “I did not begin 2014 by imagining that the most resonant movie moment of the 12 months to come would be a quiet, resigned stare-down […]
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Paper Trumpets #12: Technological Motherfucker
I made this one on a block of wood… I like the natural feel that the wood creates and it makes a great background that gives the collage pieces a disembodied feel.
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The Rumpus Interview with Alex Dimitrov and Kate Durbin
Alex Dimitrov and Kate Durbin interview each other about place and poetics and poetry in performance, as well as poetry in LA and New York, and using culture as a prop.
...moreWriting Tomorrow Better
Find yourself at the New York Times for Nick Bilton’s most recent article, a piece on the ways in which the sci-fi of the past has affected our real-life present. Moreover, Bilton highlights a recently formed group of writers, aware of literature’s future-shaping effects, interested in writing more auspicious future fiction: One thing writers are […]
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Beyond the Wishes of the Genie: Remembering Robin Williams
Williams is not free to “see the world” with a little brown suitcase in hand nor is he free to miss Aladdin or anyone else.
...moreThe Loneliest Art
Does screenwriting qualify as “real” writing? Over at the New Yorker, Richard Brody wonders what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed shot at Hollywood reveals about film as an industry and as an art: Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are […]
...moreDangerous Fictions
Hollywood’s sensationalized sex trafficking stories aren’t helping real life victims. Over at Salon, Noah Berlatsky looks at the truth—and the fiction—behind popular trafficking narratives.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jerry Stahl
Writer and Rumpus columnist Jerry Stahl sits down for a candid chat about memoir, novels, shame, parenthood, being pigeonholed, and managing “the neat trick of being an outsider in all genres.”
...moreHappy Birthday, Dorothy Parker!
Dorothy Parker, American writer, editor, and critic, was born today in 1893. Parker wrote fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays (including A Star is Born, for which she received an Oscar nomination), and is remembered in particular for her acid wit. A member of the Algonquin Round Table, she was also an ardent leftist, and was eventually […]
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