Grass Harp: Movies about Writing

I read the novella before watching the movie so I could nitpick, but I won’t.

This is yet another Capote tale based upon the aunts/cousins he lived with in the south, however, this time the story is more fictionalized. And the cast is stacked!

Edward Furlong (in a time after Terminator 2, but hopefully before the substance abuse) plays Colin, the nephew and narrator who lives with his older cousins. Aunt Dolly (Piper Laurie) is another version of Capote’s sweet and somewhat eccentric cousin Sook. Dolly makes a herbal remedy popular in their small town. Her sister Verena (Sissy Spacek) has controlled Dolly and Colin’s lives for years. When she brings home a snake oil salesman (holy crap - it’s Jack Lemmon) who wants to buy Dolly’s medical recipe, it drives Dolly, Colin and the servant/friend Catherine (Nell Carter) literally up a tree. They are soon joined by other people done with society - a judge (Walter Mathau), the coolest teen in town (Sean Patrick Flanery- one of my first crushes), and a family of traveling evangelists led by Mary Steenburgen. The people of the town start to take sides on whether they think the tree dwellers have lost their minds or if they deserve a break from the world. By the way, the townspeople include Joe Don Baker, Charles During, Scott Wilson, and FREAKING Roddy McDowell. Did they just send out a casting call for all character actors who weren’t busy that month?

The movie tries to add more backstory, showing Colin’s life before he lives with his Aunt Dolly and Aunt Verena. There is a little more of his talk about daydreaming, stories he’d make up, and Colin’s enjoyment of thinking up adventures he and his Aunt Dolly would never have. No major spoilers here, but I will say that later, Colin leaves for the city in order to get experience as a writer. The Judge gifts him a fancy notebook to get him started and Colin takes the Judge to listen to the “grass harp”, voices “inside his head” and the loudest voice is Dolly’s.

The Great Race: Movies about Writing

Despite this being a long film, this will be a short blog. Let’s talk about determination in a writer.

This comedic masterpiece directed by Blake Edwards is meant to be a nod to the melodramas of the silent era. The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis is a master of all trades with a dazzling smile and his perfectly clean clothes. As its the turn of the century full of new innovation, Leslie has agreed to an automobile race against his rival, the mustached Professor Fate (played by my classic Hollywood crush - Jack Lemmon) from New York to Paris. Keenan Wynn and Peter Falk play their assistants respectfully. Still, it is Natalie Wood’s character Maggie Dubois that I’m going to talk about.

Miss Dubois is a suffragist attempting to live an “emancipated” life full of smoking cigars and making grand speeches. She bullies her way into a job on a newspaper and enters the race in order to report on it. This is after both Leslie and Fate refuse to take her with them in their cars. She brings carrier pigeons with her to send her stories and photos back to the newspaper office in New York. This woman is so dedicated to proving her skills as a writer, she literally works on a news story about a bar fight while standing in the middle of bar fight. Each time she meets with a problem that will keep her from getting her scoop, she fibs and cheats in a most charming ways possible. Granted, by the end of the movie, it’s more about just finishing the race than the story, but her determination until she no longer has her pigeons is admirable.

Plus, she kicks ass in the massive pie fight in the movie and I’d like to think that is a secret writer skill we never get to explore.