Finding Forrester
2000
PG-13 | 2h 16min | Drama | 12 January 2001 (USA)
A young writing prodigy finds a mentor in a reclusive author.
Director:
Gus Van Sant
Writer:
Mike Rich
Stars:
Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham | See full cast & crew »
EditCastCast overview, first billed only:
Sean Connery...William Forrester
Rob Brown...Jamal Wallace
F. Murray Abraham...Prof. Robert Crawford
Anna Paquin...Claire Spence
Busta Rhymes...Terrell Wallace
2000
PG-13 | 2h 16min | Drama | 12 January 2001 (USA)
A young writing prodigy finds a mentor in a reclusive author.
Director:
Gus Van Sant
Writer:
Mike Rich
Stars:
Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham | See full cast & crew »
EditCastCast overview, first billed only:
Sean Connery...William Forrester
Rob Brown...Jamal Wallace
F. Murray Abraham...Prof. Robert Crawford
Anna Paquin...Claire Spence
Busta Rhymes...Terrell Wallace
Storyline
Because of scoring exceptionally high on a statewide standardized exam and being an exceptionally good basketball player Jamal Wallace is sent to a prestigious prep school in Manhattan. He soon befriends the reclusive writer, William Forrester. The friendship leads William to overcome his reclusiveness and for Jamal to overcome the racial prejudices and pursue his true dream - writing.
Because of scoring exceptionally high on a statewide standardized exam and being an exceptionally good basketball player Jamal Wallace is sent to a prestigious prep school in Manhattan. He soon befriends the reclusive writer, William Forrester. The friendship leads William to overcome his reclusiveness and for Jamal to overcome the racial prejudices and pursue his true dream - writing.
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**Books, meals, activities, etc. Typical, but subject to variation.
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Tuition and Fees for 2016-2017Tuition$35,900
New Student Fee$2,000
Bus Service (optional)$2,300-2,400*
Other Costs$2,500-$3,500***Middle School service/Upper School service (subsidized) 50% fee credit
**Books, meals, activities, etc. Typical, but subject to variation.
Harvard-Westlake offers the following payment plans for families.
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Rob Brown got the role after initially auditioning as an extra. Brown had no aspirations of being an actor, and was only hoping to make some money to pay his 300 dollar cell phone bill. But Gus Van Sant invited him to audition for the role of Jamal, and liked his natural ability.
When Jamal checks out the data on Forrester with the school's computer, the facts he discovers are Sean Connery's real-life data.
During filming, it was discovered that Sean Connery could not type. When you see Forrester's hands on the keys, they are someone else's hands.
In addition to being based on J.D. Salinger, William Forrester is also heavily inspired by John Kennedy Toole. Toole wrote the book "A Confederacy of Dunces", a mysteriously autobiographical book, but when no one would publish it, he committed suicide in his car. Years later, the book was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.
The famous line from the film, "You're the man now, Dog!", served as the inspiration for the popular internet site YTMND.
When Forrester arrives to defend Jamal at the Mailer School, Dr. Charles Bernstein is present in the background (as Dr. Simon). Dr. Bernstein is a real poet and poetics professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
When Connery is speaking to the man delivering his groceries, Connery replies, "Of course you are." This same remark is also said by Connery in The Rock (1996), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Rising Sun (1993), and also by Clancy Brown in Highlander (1986), which also stars Sean Connery.
The movie that Forrester is watching when Jamal first enters the apartment is The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford.
Jim Titus was originally on the set as an extra. Gus Van Sant and Assistant Director David Webb noticed him joking with the actress who played the teacher, and they offered him a line in the film.
DIRECTOR_CAMEO(Gus Van Sant): Library assistant (at a computer in background) where Jamal attempts to check out Forrester's "Avalon Landing" novel (R1 DVD Time: 1:07:48).
The sketch used to portray a young Forrester in the New Yorker and on the wall of famous writers at the school is based on a young Sean Connery. The same picture is on a desk in Mark Trevor's house in Another Time, Another Place (1958), in which Connery was introduced to a big audience.
In the opening, the stack of books (presumably Jamal's) is comprised of the following titles: 'Journey to the Center of the Earth', Jules Verne; 'After the Banquet,' Yukio Mishima; 'The Sound of Waves,' Yukio Mishima; 'The Temple of Dawn,' Yukio Mishima; 'The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea', Yukio Mishima; 'The Viking Portable Chekhov'; 'Philosophical Fragments,' Soren Kierkegaard; 'The Sickness Unto Death,' Soren Kierkegaard; 'Fear and Trembling,' Soren Kierkegaard; 'Marquis de Sade: A Study,' Simone de Beauvoir; 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', James Joyce; 'Sometimes a Great Notion,' Ken Kesey; 'Finnegans Wake,' James Joyce; 'The Illustrated Man,' Ray Bradbury; 'Fool for Love,' Sam Shepard; 'Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy', Rene Descartes.
The film cast includes four Oscar winners: Sean Connery, Matt Damon, Anna Paquin, and F. Murray Abraham; and one Oscar nominee: Gus Van Sant.
The song missing from the distributed soundtrack is titled "Gassenhauer" ("Street Song"). It is the background tune used while Forrester rides his bike. Composer Carl Orff (1895-1982), whose rendition is used in the film, gave its possible year of origin as 1536 by lutenist Hans Neusiedler.
The scenes in the Mailor-Callow School were filmed at Regis High School in Manhattan, an all-scholarship high school on the upper east side.
Stock footage of housing projects in the Bronx, is reused from Q & A (1990).
Joey Buttafuoco's elusive "Night Man" bit part comprises a few seconds of on-screen time as he offers Jamal a flashlight just before Jamal escorts Forrester onto an empty baseball field (R1 DVD Time 1:21:34).
As Robert Crawford places entries for the school writing competition on a desk, some of the essays' authors' names are those of the movie's crew members: James Pollard (Dolly Grip) and Joyce Tollefson (Assistant to Mr. Connery), et cetera (R1 DVD Time 1:30:19).
The character of Robert Crawford is based on a real life Robert Crawford, who teaches history at Phillips Academy Andover, a private school outside of Boston.
In the scene where Busta Rhymes is eating dinner with his mother, he is wearing a Bushi t-shirt. Bushi is Busta's new clothing line.
Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham also play ideological rivals in The Name of the Rose (1986).
Gus Van Sant previously directed a remake of the 1960 classic Psycho, which starred Janet Leigh. Busta Rhymes (Terrell) later starred in Halloween: Resurrection (2002), which featured Leigh's real life daughter, actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
DVD features two deleted choir scenes ("Lacrymosa" and "Lean On Me"). Additionally, the trailer contains a line by Jamal's mother ("Have you seen my son's backpack?") that is not used in the final film.
When Jamal checks out the data on Forrester with the school's computer, the facts he discovers are Sean Connery's real-life data.
During filming, it was discovered that Sean Connery could not type. When you see Forrester's hands on the keys, they are someone else's hands.
In addition to being based on J.D. Salinger, William Forrester is also heavily inspired by John Kennedy Toole. Toole wrote the book "A Confederacy of Dunces", a mysteriously autobiographical book, but when no one would publish it, he committed suicide in his car. Years later, the book was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.
The famous line from the film, "You're the man now, Dog!", served as the inspiration for the popular internet site YTMND.
When Forrester arrives to defend Jamal at the Mailer School, Dr. Charles Bernstein is present in the background (as Dr. Simon). Dr. Bernstein is a real poet and poetics professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
When Connery is speaking to the man delivering his groceries, Connery replies, "Of course you are." This same remark is also said by Connery in The Rock (1996), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Rising Sun (1993), and also by Clancy Brown in Highlander (1986), which also stars Sean Connery.
The movie that Forrester is watching when Jamal first enters the apartment is The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford.
Jim Titus was originally on the set as an extra. Gus Van Sant and Assistant Director David Webb noticed him joking with the actress who played the teacher, and they offered him a line in the film.
DIRECTOR_CAMEO(Gus Van Sant): Library assistant (at a computer in background) where Jamal attempts to check out Forrester's "Avalon Landing" novel (R1 DVD Time: 1:07:48).
The sketch used to portray a young Forrester in the New Yorker and on the wall of famous writers at the school is based on a young Sean Connery. The same picture is on a desk in Mark Trevor's house in Another Time, Another Place (1958), in which Connery was introduced to a big audience.
In the opening, the stack of books (presumably Jamal's) is comprised of the following titles: 'Journey to the Center of the Earth', Jules Verne; 'After the Banquet,' Yukio Mishima; 'The Sound of Waves,' Yukio Mishima; 'The Temple of Dawn,' Yukio Mishima; 'The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea', Yukio Mishima; 'The Viking Portable Chekhov'; 'Philosophical Fragments,' Soren Kierkegaard; 'The Sickness Unto Death,' Soren Kierkegaard; 'Fear and Trembling,' Soren Kierkegaard; 'Marquis de Sade: A Study,' Simone de Beauvoir; 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', James Joyce; 'Sometimes a Great Notion,' Ken Kesey; 'Finnegans Wake,' James Joyce; 'The Illustrated Man,' Ray Bradbury; 'Fool for Love,' Sam Shepard; 'Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy', Rene Descartes.
The film cast includes four Oscar winners: Sean Connery, Matt Damon, Anna Paquin, and F. Murray Abraham; and one Oscar nominee: Gus Van Sant.
The song missing from the distributed soundtrack is titled "Gassenhauer" ("Street Song"). It is the background tune used while Forrester rides his bike. Composer Carl Orff (1895-1982), whose rendition is used in the film, gave its possible year of origin as 1536 by lutenist Hans Neusiedler.
The scenes in the Mailor-Callow School were filmed at Regis High School in Manhattan, an all-scholarship high school on the upper east side.
Stock footage of housing projects in the Bronx, is reused from Q & A (1990).
Joey Buttafuoco's elusive "Night Man" bit part comprises a few seconds of on-screen time as he offers Jamal a flashlight just before Jamal escorts Forrester onto an empty baseball field (R1 DVD Time 1:21:34).
As Robert Crawford places entries for the school writing competition on a desk, some of the essays' authors' names are those of the movie's crew members: James Pollard (Dolly Grip) and Joyce Tollefson (Assistant to Mr. Connery), et cetera (R1 DVD Time 1:30:19).
The character of Robert Crawford is based on a real life Robert Crawford, who teaches history at Phillips Academy Andover, a private school outside of Boston.
In the scene where Busta Rhymes is eating dinner with his mother, he is wearing a Bushi t-shirt. Bushi is Busta's new clothing line.
Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham also play ideological rivals in The Name of the Rose (1986).
Gus Van Sant previously directed a remake of the 1960 classic Psycho, which starred Janet Leigh. Busta Rhymes (Terrell) later starred in Halloween: Resurrection (2002), which featured Leigh's real life daughter, actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
DVD features two deleted choir scenes ("Lacrymosa" and "Lean On Me"). Additionally, the trailer contains a line by Jamal's mother ("Have you seen my son's backpack?") that is not used in the final film.
Finding Forrester
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Produced by Sean Connery and
Laurence Mark
Written by Mike Rich
Starring
CinematographyHarris Savides
Edited byValdís Óskarsdóttir
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release date
Running time136 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$43 million
Box office$80,049,764Finding Forrester is a 2000 American drama film written by Mike Rich and directed by Gus Van Sant. In the film, an African-American teenager, Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), is invited to attend a prestigious private high school. By chance, Jamal befriends a reclusive writer, William Forrester (Sean Connery), through whom he refines his talent for writing and comes to terms with his identity. Anna Paquin, F. Murray Abraham, Michael Pitt, Glenn Fitzgerald, April Grace and Busta Rhymes star in supporting roles.
Although the film is not based on a true story, film critics have compared the character portrayed by Connery with real life writer J. D. Salinger. Connery later acknowledged that the inspiration for his role was indeed Salinger.
PlotSixteen-year-old Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) plays basketball with his friends in New York. A recluse, William Forrester (Sean Connery), lives on the top floor of the building across from the court. The kids regularly notice him watching them. One of the boys dares Jamal to sneak into the apartment and retrieve an item. Jamal takes a letter opener only to be surprised by Forrester and inadvertently leaves his backpack behind. Forrester later drops Jamal's backpack onto the street. Jamal returns home to find that Forrester wrote notes in Jamal's journals. Jamal returns to Forrester's apartment and asks him to read more of his writing. Forrester tells him to begin with 5,000 words on why Jamal should "stay the fuck out of my home," which he completes and leaves on the doorstep the following day.
Jamal returns the next day, and is invited inside. Forrester knows that a representative from Mailor-Callow, a prestigious private school, offered Jamal a full academic scholarship, partly for his skill on the basketball court and partly for his test scores. Jamal learns that Forrester is the author of a famous book, Avalon Landing, and that he has never published another. Forrester agrees to help Jamal with his writing as long as Jamal does not ask about his personal life or tell others of his whearabouts.
Jamal's writing improves, which causes Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), a professor at Mailor-Callow, to suspect plagiarism.
Jamal convinces Forrester to attend a game at Madison Square Garden, but Forrester cannot handle the crowds and has an anxiety attack. Jamal takes him instead to see Yankee Stadium late at night after everyone has gone where Forrester tells Jamal details about his family, which explains the basis of his book, specifically his brother's post-war trauma, alcoholism and Forrester's indirect role in his death. He also explains how the subsequent deaths of his parents soon after affected him and led to his becoming a recluse.
Forrester gives Jamal some of his own private essays to rewrite, with the condition that Jamal is not to take them from the apartment.
Meanwhile, there is a school writing contest coming up, and Crawford forces Jamal to stay after school so he can watch him produce an essay. Jamal can not write under such conditions and running out of time, he submits one of Forrester's exercises to the contest.
Jamal is then called in by Crawford and the school board who reveal that Forrester indeed published the article that Jamal's essay is based on. Crawford finds the parallels between the two pieces and brings Jamal up on plagiarism charges.
Jamal must either cite Forrester's work or prove he had Forrester's permission to use the material. He refuses to do either to keep his promise to Forrester. Crawford demands that Jamal write an apology letter to his classmates and read it in front of the class which Jamal also refuses which may lead to his expulsion.
Jamal tells Forrester what he has done and asks him to defend him, but Forrester is angry at Jamal for breaking his promise about taking the paper. Jamal accuses Forrester of being scared and selfish for not helping him.
Jamal is told by the school that they will drop the plagiarism charges if he wins them the state championship. Jamal does well in the game but ambiguously misses two free throw shots at the end of the game, costing the team the championship. Jamal writes an essay to Forrester that discusses the gift of friendship. Jamal's brother, Terrell (Busta Rhymes), finds the essay sealed in an envelope and gives it to Forrester.
Jamal attends the school contest. During the readings by other students, Forrester appears, announces himself and receives permission to read an essay that draws overwhelming applause from the students. As Crawford is praising the work, Forrester acknowledges his friendship with Jamal and reveals that the essay he had just read was written by Jamal. He also explains that Jamal had written the contest essay using the published title and first paragraph with permission. Crawford adamantly states that this will not change any of the board's decisions. The board overrules him and drops the plagiarism charges, readmitting Jamal's entry to the competition. After the competition, Forrester thanks Jamal for his friendship and tells him of his desire to visit his native land of Scotland.
A year later, Forrester's attorney (Matt Damon) meets with Jamal and tells him that Forrester died of cancer, with which he had been diagnosed before he met Jamal. The lawyer gives Jamal the keys to Forrester's apartment, a package, and a letter in which Forrester thanks Jamal for helping him rekindle his desire to live. The package contains the manuscript of Forrester's second novel, for which Jamal is expected to write the foreword.
Cast
Rob Brown auditioned for the film, hoping to make enough money to pay his $300 cell phone bill. Gus Van Sant had him read a second time and then cast him as one of the leads. Before Sean Connery was cast as William Forrester, Bill Murray was considered for the role.[8]
ReceptionThe film received limited release on December 22, 2000 in 200 theaters, grossing USD $701,207 in the opening weekend. It later received commercial release where it opened at #1 in 2001 theaters, grossing $11,112,139 in the opening weekend.[9] It went on to gross $51,804,714 in the United States and Canada and $28,245,050 elsewhere for a worldwide total of $80,049,764.
Critical responseUpon its initial release, Finding Forrester received generally positive reviews. It garnered two thumbs up from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper, with Roeper considering it one of the 10 best films of the year. In late 2009, Roeper included the film at number 64 on his list of the 100 best movies of the decade.
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 74% based on review from 125 critics, with an average score of 6.5/10.[11] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 62 based on 27 reviews. CinemaScore reported that audiences gave the film a rare "A+" grade.
SoundtrackTrack listing
The song "Gassenhauer", from Schulwerk by Carl Orff and arranged and produced by Bill Brown is a notable track that appears in the actual film but was not included on the soundtrack. It is played during Forrester's bike ride.
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Produced by Sean Connery and
Laurence Mark
Written by Mike Rich
Starring
CinematographyHarris Savides
Edited byValdís Óskarsdóttir
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release date
- December 22, 2000
Running time136 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$43 million
Box office$80,049,764Finding Forrester is a 2000 American drama film written by Mike Rich and directed by Gus Van Sant. In the film, an African-American teenager, Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), is invited to attend a prestigious private high school. By chance, Jamal befriends a reclusive writer, William Forrester (Sean Connery), through whom he refines his talent for writing and comes to terms with his identity. Anna Paquin, F. Murray Abraham, Michael Pitt, Glenn Fitzgerald, April Grace and Busta Rhymes star in supporting roles.
Although the film is not based on a true story, film critics have compared the character portrayed by Connery with real life writer J. D. Salinger. Connery later acknowledged that the inspiration for his role was indeed Salinger.
PlotSixteen-year-old Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) plays basketball with his friends in New York. A recluse, William Forrester (Sean Connery), lives on the top floor of the building across from the court. The kids regularly notice him watching them. One of the boys dares Jamal to sneak into the apartment and retrieve an item. Jamal takes a letter opener only to be surprised by Forrester and inadvertently leaves his backpack behind. Forrester later drops Jamal's backpack onto the street. Jamal returns home to find that Forrester wrote notes in Jamal's journals. Jamal returns to Forrester's apartment and asks him to read more of his writing. Forrester tells him to begin with 5,000 words on why Jamal should "stay the fuck out of my home," which he completes and leaves on the doorstep the following day.
Jamal returns the next day, and is invited inside. Forrester knows that a representative from Mailor-Callow, a prestigious private school, offered Jamal a full academic scholarship, partly for his skill on the basketball court and partly for his test scores. Jamal learns that Forrester is the author of a famous book, Avalon Landing, and that he has never published another. Forrester agrees to help Jamal with his writing as long as Jamal does not ask about his personal life or tell others of his whearabouts.
Jamal's writing improves, which causes Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), a professor at Mailor-Callow, to suspect plagiarism.
Jamal convinces Forrester to attend a game at Madison Square Garden, but Forrester cannot handle the crowds and has an anxiety attack. Jamal takes him instead to see Yankee Stadium late at night after everyone has gone where Forrester tells Jamal details about his family, which explains the basis of his book, specifically his brother's post-war trauma, alcoholism and Forrester's indirect role in his death. He also explains how the subsequent deaths of his parents soon after affected him and led to his becoming a recluse.
Forrester gives Jamal some of his own private essays to rewrite, with the condition that Jamal is not to take them from the apartment.
Meanwhile, there is a school writing contest coming up, and Crawford forces Jamal to stay after school so he can watch him produce an essay. Jamal can not write under such conditions and running out of time, he submits one of Forrester's exercises to the contest.
Jamal is then called in by Crawford and the school board who reveal that Forrester indeed published the article that Jamal's essay is based on. Crawford finds the parallels between the two pieces and brings Jamal up on plagiarism charges.
Jamal must either cite Forrester's work or prove he had Forrester's permission to use the material. He refuses to do either to keep his promise to Forrester. Crawford demands that Jamal write an apology letter to his classmates and read it in front of the class which Jamal also refuses which may lead to his expulsion.
Jamal tells Forrester what he has done and asks him to defend him, but Forrester is angry at Jamal for breaking his promise about taking the paper. Jamal accuses Forrester of being scared and selfish for not helping him.
Jamal is told by the school that they will drop the plagiarism charges if he wins them the state championship. Jamal does well in the game but ambiguously misses two free throw shots at the end of the game, costing the team the championship. Jamal writes an essay to Forrester that discusses the gift of friendship. Jamal's brother, Terrell (Busta Rhymes), finds the essay sealed in an envelope and gives it to Forrester.
Jamal attends the school contest. During the readings by other students, Forrester appears, announces himself and receives permission to read an essay that draws overwhelming applause from the students. As Crawford is praising the work, Forrester acknowledges his friendship with Jamal and reveals that the essay he had just read was written by Jamal. He also explains that Jamal had written the contest essay using the published title and first paragraph with permission. Crawford adamantly states that this will not change any of the board's decisions. The board overrules him and drops the plagiarism charges, readmitting Jamal's entry to the competition. After the competition, Forrester thanks Jamal for his friendship and tells him of his desire to visit his native land of Scotland.
A year later, Forrester's attorney (Matt Damon) meets with Jamal and tells him that Forrester died of cancer, with which he had been diagnosed before he met Jamal. The lawyer gives Jamal the keys to Forrester's apartment, a package, and a letter in which Forrester thanks Jamal for helping him rekindle his desire to live. The package contains the manuscript of Forrester's second novel, for which Jamal is expected to write the foreword.
Cast
- Sean Connery as William Forrester
- Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace
- F. Murray Abraham as Crawford
- Anna Paquin as Claire
- Busta Rhymes as Terrell
- April Grace as Ms. Joyce
- Michael Pitt as Coleridge
- Matt Damon as Sanderson
- Glenn Fitzgerald as Massie
Rob Brown auditioned for the film, hoping to make enough money to pay his $300 cell phone bill. Gus Van Sant had him read a second time and then cast him as one of the leads. Before Sean Connery was cast as William Forrester, Bill Murray was considered for the role.[8]
ReceptionThe film received limited release on December 22, 2000 in 200 theaters, grossing USD $701,207 in the opening weekend. It later received commercial release where it opened at #1 in 2001 theaters, grossing $11,112,139 in the opening weekend.[9] It went on to gross $51,804,714 in the United States and Canada and $28,245,050 elsewhere for a worldwide total of $80,049,764.
Critical responseUpon its initial release, Finding Forrester received generally positive reviews. It garnered two thumbs up from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper, with Roeper considering it one of the 10 best films of the year. In late 2009, Roeper included the film at number 64 on his list of the 100 best movies of the decade.
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 74% based on review from 125 critics, with an average score of 6.5/10.[11] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 62 based on 27 reviews. CinemaScore reported that audiences gave the film a rare "A+" grade.
SoundtrackTrack listing
- "Recollections" (Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul)
- "Little Church" (Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Grossman, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin)
- "Black Satin" (David Creamer, Miles Davis, Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, James Mtume, Badal Roy, Collin Walcott)
- "Under a Golden Sky" (Bill Frisell)
- "Happy House" (Ed Blackwell, Bobby Bradford, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Dewey Redman)
- "Over the Rainbow (Photo Book)" (Bill Frisell)
- "Lonely Fire" [Excerpt] (Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Dave Holland, Bennie Maupin, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul)
- "Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole)
- "Vonetta" (Ron Carter, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams)
- "Coffaro's Theme" (Curtis Fowlkes, Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, Ron Miles)
- "Foreigner in a Free Land" (Ornette Coleman, The London Symphony Orchestra, David Measham)
- "Beautiful E." (Joey Baron, Kermit Driscoll, Bill Frisell, Hank Roberts)
- "In a Silent Way [DJ Cam Remix]" (Miles Davis)
The song "Gassenhauer", from Schulwerk by Carl Orff and arranged and produced by Bill Brown is a notable track that appears in the actual film but was not included on the soundtrack. It is played during Forrester's bike ride.
Jerome David Salinger (/ˈsælᵻndʒər/; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer who is known for his widely-read novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Following his early success publishing short stories and The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980.
Salinger was raised in Manhattan and began writing short stories while in secondary school. Several were published in Story magazine[1] in the early 1940s before he began serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his later work.
In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers.[2] The novel remains widely read and controversial,[a] selling around 250,000 copies a year.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961); and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924", appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924" in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity the release was indefinitely delayed.[3][4] He made headlines around the globe in June 2009 when he filed a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of the characters from The Catcher in the Rye.[5] Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.[6][7][8] In November 2013, three unpublished stories by Salinger were briefly posted online. One of the stories, "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls", is said to be a prequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger was raised in Manhattan and began writing short stories while in secondary school. Several were published in Story magazine[1] in the early 1940s before he began serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his later work.
In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers.[2] The novel remains widely read and controversial,[a] selling around 250,000 copies a year.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961); and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924", appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924" in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity the release was indefinitely delayed.[3][4] He made headlines around the globe in June 2009 when he filed a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of the characters from The Catcher in the Rye.[5] Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.[6][7][8] In November 2013, three unpublished stories by Salinger were briefly posted online. One of the stories, "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls", is said to be a prequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
J. D. Salinger’s Women ShareThis
When Maynard came home for the summer, they continued their correspondence. After they had exchanged about 25 letters, Maynard went to Cornish to see Salinger. Then, instead of returning to Yale for her sophomore year, she moved in with Salinger. “Her father was furious,” says a friend of the Maynard family, “not only because she was living with J. D. Salinger but, on a more practical level, because she had dropped out of college. He always thought she had the potential to write literature. He didn’t want her to sell out.”
No doubt Maynard must have felt she was fulfilling her father’s dreams, for during the fall and on into the winter, while she lived with Salinger, who worked regularly on writing he did not intend to publish, Maynard herself worked on a memoir called Looking Back, a book based on her Times Magazine cover story. One highlight of the long winter was the trip Salinger and Maynard made into Manhattan when, one day, Salinger bought her a coat and then took her to lunch to meet his friend William Shawn.
Mostly, Maynard and Salinger stayed in Cornish and wrote. When they were not working, Maynard puttered around the house, which she later described as being furnished in a “pedestrian” fashion. Salinger liked to lecture her on the advantages of homeopathic medicine and on Zen Buddhism.
The sex life of Maynard and Salinger, Maynard has told people, consisted only of oral sex. The arrangement was Maynard’s decision rather than Salinger’s. Even then, however, one of Maynard’s life ambitions was to have a family, but Salinger had made it clear that he had no intentions of having any more children, and the issue became a source of contention between them over the winter. Finally, in the late spring, when the couple traveled to Florida on a vacation, the conflict reached a breaking point. They were lounging on the beach when Salinger finally gave her his own unqualified answer: If that’s what she wanted, then their relationship was over. When they got back to Cornish, she should move her things out. It was at this point, as Maynard later described it to a friend, that she stood up from the beach, brushed the sand off her arms and legs, and left. Her affair with Salinger was over. It had lasted ten months.
The grey-haired man turned his head again toward the girl, perhaps to show her how forbearing, even stoic, his countenance was.
--Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”
In 1981, the actress Elaine Joyce was working on a short-lived television series called Mr. Merlin when she received an interesting piece of mail. The widow of singer Bobby Van, Joyce was 36 at the time. The letter was from J. D. Salinger. “I was doing a series,” says Joyce, “and he wrote me a letter. I get fan mail all the time, but I was shocked. I really didn’t believe it. It was a letter of introduction to me about my work.” Joyce responded, just as Maynard had; and in this case, as well, a sustained correspondence followed. “It took me forever,” she says, “but I wrote back, and then we wrote to each other quite a bit.” As he had with Maynard, Salinger eventually arranged for the two of them to meet, and they began a relationship. The couple spent a lot of time in New York. “We were very, very private,” Joyce admits, “but you do what you do when you date -- you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.” The only real suggestion the public had that the two were involved occurred in May 1982, when the press reported that Salinger showed up for an opening night at a dinner theater in Jacksonville, Florida, where Joyce was appearing in the play 6 Rms Riv Vu. But to conceal their affair, Joyce denied knowing him. “We were involved for a few years all the way through the middle eighties,” Joyce says. “You could say there was a romance.”
That romance ended in the late eighties when Salinger met Colleen O’Neill, a young woman from New Hampshire who was the director of the annual Cornish town fair. “Jerry used to come and walk around the fairgrounds with her,” says Burnace Fitch Johnson, a former Cornish town clerk. “Colleen would have to repeat things to him when people spoke to him, because he’s quite deaf.”
Their relationship developed to the point where, as of 1992, when the New York Times ran a story about a fire at Salinger’s house, the reporter identified Colleen as being “his wife.” She was also, according to the newspaper, “considerably younger than her husband.”
Johnson confirms that, as of today, the couple has been “married for about ten years.” Since 1992, at least as far as public surfacings are concerned, the Salingers have remained in seclusion -- until Joyce Maynard, that ghost from the past, celebrated her 44th birthday last year by showing up on their doorstep.
As for Maynard, since 1973, she has published her books and married an artist, Steve Bethel, with whom she had the children she wanted so badly (a daughter and two sons). In 1989, her marriage having failed, she set out on what would end up being for her, as she called it, a “many-years-long search for true love, while engaged in raising kids.” This search included a six-month love affair with a musician, followed by a period during which she had casual sexual flings with a number of men.
“Fifteen minutes into our first date,” one of these men says, “Joyce kept referring to this guy named Jerry. She was talking about ‘Jerry this’ and ‘Jerry that.’ It was as though they still knew each other. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the Jerry she was talking about was J. D. Salinger.
“Joyce,” he continues, “is the most self-obsessed person I’ve ever met. She gives narcissism a bad name.”
One morning, Maynard let him read her cache of Salinger letters. On a number of occasions, she discussed how she would never write about Salinger, out of respect for his privacy. One story Maynard told him spoke to the very nature of Salinger’s personality, his saga, and the kind of life he may have lived -- and the number of women he was involved with -- once he and Maynard broke up. One time, Maynard was at a literary dinner party in Manhattan years after her affair with Salinger had ended. At this dinner party, Maynard told her friend, were two women writers about her age, X and Y, who did not like her. Maynard offered a passing veiled reference to Salinger that X and Y overheard. Then X made a comment to Y loud enough for Maynard to hear. “You know,” X said to Y, “I have a cache of Salinger letters, too.”
In Cornish, Salinger, who was now 34, devoted some of his social life to entertaining teenagers who attended the local high school. In particular, he often escorted teenage girls to school dances and sporting events. Then, in 1954, at a party in Cambridge, he met Claire Douglas, the daughter of the respected British art critic Robert Langdon Douglas. A peppy, bright Radcliffe co-ed, she was 19. Claire was soon spending time in Salinger’s Cornish home. As Salinger’s romance with Claire blossomed, he was also in the process of imagining Franny Glass, one of his most fully realized characters and one who bears more than a passing resemblance to Claire herself. On February 17, 1955, at just about the time he published “Franny” in The New Yorker, Salinger married Douglas and gave the story to her as a wedding present. They had a daughter, Margaret, in December of that year. A son, Matthew, was born in 1960.
In 1961, Salinger published Franny and Zooey, a literary event considered so noteworthy Time put Salinger on its cover. In 1963, he published Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, which despite horrendous reviews became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller. During these years of intense work, Salinger withdrew more and more into himself -- and away from Claire.
“He was just never home,” says a former Salinger employee. “He had a studio” -- actually a concrete structure resembling a bunker -- “down a quarter of a mile from the house, and he was always there. He’d be there for two weeks at a time. He had a little stove he could heat food on. I think it was tough on Claire. When I was there, Jerry was always down in his little writing room.”
By 1966, Claire’s life of isolation had begun to take a physical toll. “She complained of nervous tension, sleeplessness, and loss of weight, and gave me a history of marital problems with her husband which allegedly caused her condition,” Dr. Gerard Gaudrault, who examined her at the time, would write. “My examination indicated that the condition I found would naturally follow from the complaints of marital discord given to me.” Perhaps on the basis of this outside confirmation, Claire filed for divorce in September 1966. In the divorce papers, her lawyer argued that “the libelee” -- Salinger -- “wholly regardless of his marriage covenants and duties has so treated the libelant” -- Claire -- “as to injure her health and endanger her reason in that for a long period of time the libelee has treated the libelant with indifference, has for long periods of time refused to communicate with her, has declared that he does not love her and has no desire to have their marriage continue, by reason of which conduct the libelant has had her sleep disturbed, her nerves upset and has been subjected to nervous and mental strain, and has had to seek medical assistance to effect a cure of her condition, and a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”
A divorce was granted in early October 1967.
I saw her coming to meet me -- near a high, wire fence -- a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter Abelard-type man of her choice.
--De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period
On the cover of The New York Times Magazine on April 23, 1972 was a photograph of Joyce Maynard, accompanying a story with the Salingeresque title “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life.” In the picture, she is sitting on the floor of a corridor wearing red socks, blue jeans, a beige sweater. Her black hair hangs uncombed. Her gaze is childish, wide-eyed. Her smile is impish. The look and the pose -- she props an elbow against a step as she tilts her head sideways to rest her cheek in the palm of her hand -- combine to make her seem girlish, yet she is clearly a woman. “There were pictures of her taken around this time that show her,” one friend would later say, “as the Lolita of all Lolitas.”
The piece is an interesting if not brilliant work in the generational-memoir genre, linking private lives to great public events. Maynard’s thesis was that the generation that was born in the fifties -- hers -- was “a generation of unfulfilled expectations . . . special because of what we missed” and held together by common images -- “Jackie and the red roses, John-John’s salute, and Oswald’s on-camera murder.”
Salinger was so impressed by the piece -- and by Maynard -- that he typed out a one-page letter warning her about the hazards of fame. He mailed the letter to her in care of the New York Times.
By the age of 18, Maynard had already lived a complicated and productive life. She was born to intellectual parents; her father taught English literature at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and her mother, Fredelle, had published two highly regarded books, Guiding Your Child to a More Creative Life and Raisins and Almonds, a memoir of her Canadian youth. There was, however, “an elephant in the living room,” as Maynard has put it; her father was an alcoholic. According to a childhood friend of Maynard’s, she “blamed his alcoholism on having a failed career as an artist” -- a view her family and friends did not share.
In 1970, Maynard transferred from the Durham public schools to Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter’s first co-ed class. While there, she published a story in Seventeen based on the unwanted pregnancy of a teenage couple in Durham; the piece angered local citizens, who felt Maynard had invaded the couple’s privacy. In the fall of 1971, Maynard entered Yale University, as a part of its third class to include women. As a freshman, she published “The Embarrassment of Virginity” in Mademoiselle, then her cover story in The New York Times Magazine. Her fellow students could dismiss the former but not the latter. “When I walked into the first class we had after the Times article appeared,” says Leslie Epstein, who taught the creative-writing class Maynard took that spring semester at Yale, “I could see the envy rising off the other students like steam off a radiator.”
One day, as she was sifting through the bags of fan mail she received in response to the Times article, she started reading one particular letter. Over the years, Maynard would say that, even as she read it for the first time, she knew the letter was the most profound and insightful she had read in her entire life. What’s more, she felt an instant connection with the letter’s author. Then, reaching the end of the page, she saw the signature -- “J. D. Salinger.”
Maynard and Salinger corresponded for the rest of the semester. Salinger sent several letters, each one to two pages long; Maynard answered them all. “It was known at the time that Joyce was in touch with Salinger,” says Samuel Heath, who attended both Phillips Exeter and Yale with Maynard. “It seems Salinger was telling her, ‘Don’t let them spoil you. Don’t let them destroy you as a voice,’ ‘them’ being the Establishment, the publishers, the outside world. He was doing the Catcher in the Rye routine -- protecting her.”
When Maynard came home for the summer, they continued their correspondence. After they had exchanged about 25 letters, Maynard went to Cornish to see Salinger. Then, instead of returning to Yale for her sophomore year, she moved in with Salinger. “Her father was furious,” says a friend of the Maynard family, “not only because she was living with J. D. Salinger but, on a more practical level, because she had dropped out of college. He always thought she had the potential to write literature. He didn’t want her to sell out.”
No doubt Maynard must have felt she was fulfilling her father’s dreams, for during the fall and on into the winter, while she lived with Salinger, who worked regularly on writing he did not intend to publish, Maynard herself worked on a memoir called Looking Back, a book based on her Times Magazine cover story. One highlight of the long winter was the trip Salinger and Maynard made into Manhattan when, one day, Salinger bought her a coat and then took her to lunch to meet his friend William Shawn.
Mostly, Maynard and Salinger stayed in Cornish and wrote. When they were not working, Maynard puttered around the house, which she later described as being furnished in a “pedestrian” fashion. Salinger liked to lecture her on the advantages of homeopathic medicine and on Zen Buddhism.
The sex life of Maynard and Salinger, Maynard has told people, consisted only of oral sex. The arrangement was Maynard’s decision rather than Salinger’s. Even then, however, one of Maynard’s life ambitions was to have a family, but Salinger had made it clear that he had no intentions of having any more children, and the issue became a source of contention between them over the winter. Finally, in the late spring, when the couple traveled to Florida on a vacation, the conflict reached a breaking point. They were lounging on the beach when Salinger finally gave her his own unqualified answer: If that’s what she wanted, then their relationship was over. When they got back to Cornish, she should move her things out. It was at this point, as Maynard later described it to a friend, that she stood up from the beach, brushed the sand off her arms and legs, and left. Her affair with Salinger was over. It had lasted ten months.
The grey-haired man turned his head again toward the girl, perhaps to show her how forbearing, even stoic, his countenance was.
--Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”
In 1981, the actress Elaine Joyce was working on a short-lived television series called Mr. Merlin when she received an interesting piece of mail. The widow of singer Bobby Van, Joyce was 36 at the time. The letter was from J. D. Salinger. “I was doing a series,” says Joyce, “and he wrote me a letter. I get fan mail all the time, but I was shocked. I really didn’t believe it. It was a letter of introduction to me about my work.” Joyce responded, just as Maynard had; and in this case, as well, a sustained correspondence followed. “It took me forever,” she says, “but I wrote back, and then we wrote to each other quite a bit.” As he had with Maynard, Salinger eventually arranged for the two of them to meet, and they began a relationship. The couple spent a lot of time in New York. “We were very, very private,” Joyce admits, “but you do what you do when you date -- you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.” The only real suggestion the public had that the two were involved occurred in May 1982, when the press reported that Salinger showed up for an opening night at a dinner theater in Jacksonville, Florida, where Joyce was appearing in the play 6 Rms Riv Vu. But to conceal their affair, Joyce denied knowing him. “We were involved for a few years all the way through the middle eighties,” Joyce says. “You could say there was a romance.”
That romance ended in the late eighties when Salinger met Colleen O’Neill, a young woman from New Hampshire who was the director of the annual Cornish town fair. “Jerry used to come and walk around the fairgrounds with her,” says Burnace Fitch Johnson, a former Cornish town clerk. “Colleen would have to repeat things to him when people spoke to him, because he’s quite deaf.”
Their relationship developed to the point where, as of 1992, when the New York Times ran a story about a fire at Salinger’s house, the reporter identified Colleen as being “his wife.” She was also, according to the newspaper, “considerably younger than her husband.”
Johnson confirms that, as of today, the couple has been “married for about ten years.” Since 1992, at least as far as public surfacings are concerned, the Salingers have remained in seclusion -- until Joyce Maynard, that ghost from the past, celebrated her 44th birthday last year by showing up on their doorstep.
As for Maynard, since 1973, she has published her books and married an artist, Steve Bethel, with whom she had the children she wanted so badly (a daughter and two sons). In 1989, her marriage having failed, she set out on what would end up being for her, as she called it, a “many-years-long search for true love, while engaged in raising kids.” This search included a six-month love affair with a musician, followed by a period during which she had casual sexual flings with a number of men.
“Fifteen minutes into our first date,” one of these men says, “Joyce kept referring to this guy named Jerry. She was talking about ‘Jerry this’ and ‘Jerry that.’ It was as though they still knew each other. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the Jerry she was talking about was J. D. Salinger.
“Joyce,” he continues, “is the most self-obsessed person I’ve ever met. She gives narcissism a bad name.”
One morning, Maynard let him read her cache of Salinger letters. On a number of occasions, she discussed how she would never write about Salinger, out of respect for his privacy. One story Maynard told him spoke to the very nature of Salinger’s personality, his saga, and the kind of life he may have lived -- and the number of women he was involved with -- once he and Maynard broke up. One time, Maynard was at a literary dinner party in Manhattan years after her affair with Salinger had ended. At this dinner party, Maynard told her friend, were two women writers about her age, X and Y, who did not like her. Maynard offered a passing veiled reference to Salinger that X and Y overheard. Then X made a comment to Y loud enough for Maynard to hear. “You know,” X said to Y, “I have a cache of Salinger letters, too.”