Barry Gifford | |
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Born | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. | October 18, 1946
Occupation | Author |
Barry Gifford (born October 18, 1946) [1] is an American author, poet, and screenwriter known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and prose influenced by film noir and Beat Generation writers.
Gifford writes nonfiction, poetry, and is best known for his series of novels about Sailor and Lula, two star-crossed protagonists on a perpetual road trip. Published in seven novels between 1990 and 2015, the Sailor and Lula series has been described by Professor Andrei Codrescu as written in "a great comic realist" style that explores "an unmistakably American universe [...] populated by a huge and lovable humanity propelled on a tragic river of excess energy." [2] The first book of the series, Wild at Heart , was adapted by director David Lynch for the 1990 film of the same title. Gifford went on to write the original screenplay for Lost Highway (1997) with Lynch. Perdita Durango, the third book in the Sailor and Lula series, was adapted into a 1997 film by Alex de la Iglesia with a script co-written by Gifford. His most recent book, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonado, published by Seven Stories Press in 2020, is a Western noir novella that traces the struggle of the first integrated Native American tribe to establish itself in North America. [3]
Gifford was born in a Chicago hotel room in 1946. [1] His father was Jewish and his mother of Irish Catholic background. [4] [5] Gifford's father was in organized crime, and he spent his childhood largely in Chicago and New Orleans living in hotels. His childhood, as recounted in his long-running series of autobiographical tales known collectively as the Roy stories, is explored in the 2020 documentary Roy's World: Barry Gifford's Chicago . After college he joined the Air Force Reserves. After a short stint pursuing a possible career in baseball, [6] Gifford focused on writing, both as a journalist and a poet. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Gifford's fourth novel, Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula , caught the eye of director David Lynch, who adapted it into the screenplay and movie Wild at Heart . The movie won the Palme d'Or, the highest honor, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. The film's success boosted interest in Gifford's novels.
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: CS1 maint: others (link) [7] David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, visual artist, and musician. He has received critical acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities.
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Lost Highway is a 1997 surrealist neo noir film directed by David Lynch and co-written by Lynch and Barry Gifford. It stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, and Robert Blake in his final film role. The film follows a musician (Pullman) who begins receiving mysterious VHS tapes of him and his wife (Arquette) in their home. He is suddenly convicted of murder, after which he inexplicably disappears and is replaced by a young mechanic (Getty) leading a different life.
Black Lizard was an American book publisher. A division of the Creative Arts Book Company of Berkeley, California, Black Lizard specialized in reprinting forgotten crime fiction and noir fiction writers and novels originally released between the 1930s and the 1960s, many of which are now acknowledged as classics of their genres.
Wild at Heart is a 1990 American romantic crime drama film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton, the film follows Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, a young couple who go on the run from Lula's domineering mother and the criminals she hires to kill Sailor.
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise.
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar and the Ovid Prize for poetry. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
Jerry Gustave Hasford, also known under his pen name Gustav Hasford, was an American novelist, journalist and poet. His semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers (1979) was the basis for the film Full Metal Jacket (1987). He was a United States Marine Corps veteran, who served as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War.
Hotel Room is an American drama anthology series that aired for three half-hour episodes on HBO on January 8, 1993, with a rerun the next night. Created by Monty Montgomery and David Lynch, each drama stars a different cast and takes place in hotel room 603 of the New York City–based "Railroad Hotel", in the years 1969, 1992, and 1936, respectively. The three episodes were created to be shown together in the form of a feature-length pilot, with the hope that if they were well received, a series of episodes in the same stand-alone half-hour format would be produced later. Following a lukewarm reception, HBO chose to not produce more episodes.
Red Light is a 1949 American film noir crime film directed and produced by Roy Del Ruth, starring George Raft and Virginia Mayo, and based on the story "This Guy Gideon" by Don "Red" Barry, featuring strong religious overtones.
Perdita Durango, released as Dance with the Devil in the United States, is a 1997 action-crime-horror film directed by Álex de la Iglesia, based on Barry Gifford's 1992 novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. It stars Rosie Perez as the title character and Javier Bardem. Harley Cross, Aimee Graham, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins appear in supporting roles. It is a Spain–United States–Mexico coproduction.
Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula is a 1990 novel by Barry Gifford.
Mexico City Blues is a long poem by Jack Kerouac, composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas, which was first published in 1959. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose technique, his Buddhist faith, emotional states, and disappointment with his own creativity—including his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and the more widely acclaimed On the Road (1957).
Wild at Heart may refer to:
Mary Sweeney is an American director, writer, film editor and film producer. She was briefly married to American film director David Lynch, whom she collaborated with for 20 years. Sweeney worked with Lynch on several films and television series, most notably the original Twin Peaks series (1990), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Sweeney is the Dino and Martha De Laurentiis Endowed Professor in the Writing Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She was formerly the chair of the Film Independent board of directors.
The Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay is an award presented at the annual Golden Raspberry Awards for the worst film screenplay of the past year. The following is a list of nominees and recipients of that award, including each screenplay's author(s).
Robert Thom was an American writer of films, plays, novels and poems. He is best known for writing the screenplay for Death Race 2000 (1975), produced by Roger Corman's New World and directed by Paul Bartel.
The following is a list of unproduced David Lynch projects in roughly chronological order. During his career, American film director David Lynch has worked on a number of projects that never progressed beyond the pre-production stage under his direction. Some of them fell into development hell and others were officially canceled.
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