There will be plenty to say once Shopgirl comes out in the fall—I’ll even try to swing a press pass so I can report back to you sooner—but for now it seems best to collect the available data into one post and say: Ecce Homo! Ecce Danes! I’m sure that’s not proper Latin. Corrections from Bostonians and smartypants relatives are welcome. Anyway, here is the official site, where you can watch the trailer; here it is on IMDb, which, while not my favorite movie resource, is my daily helpmeet. This is the poster.

Furthermore, Steve Martin has, of course, been talking about both the movie and the book. Meghan Daum interviewed him for the May Believer; the whole text is on AlterNet, which has a stern no-reproduction policy and which I sense (probably erroneously) I shouldn’t piss off, but there are tons of questions about Shopgirl in both its forms, not to mention Martin’s non-obvious inspiration for his Shouts & Murmurs pieces and a bit about his Osama riff in the March 5th New Yorker. (Randomly: someone’s nutty compatability chart for Osama and Martin.)

And from a little About.com interview with Martin in 2003:

For “Shopgirl”, how did you get into the mind of a young girl?
You know, it’s a tough question to answer because the answer is really just experience. Talking to people. I’m this age, I’ve lived a lot.

But you got into her mind.
Well, that’s from listening and asking. It’s not conscious, the listening and asking. It’s when you go to write something like that that you realize, “I remember this, I know this.” You’re surprised at what you know. Let’s put it that way.

You once said the writer was taking over the actor.
Well, I’m having a lot of fun re-writing this “Pink Panther” script and working on it, let’s say. So I guess that’s writing. But it’s also going to result in a movie. I don’t know, my career’s all over the place now because I had this terrible thing happen to me. I had a hit with “Bringing Down the House.” Everything was so fine. I had time on my hands, and occasionally I’d do a movie. Then suddenly I have a hit and a lot of demands and offers, and suddenly your head is kind of reeling about what to do.

Is there another play in the works?
No, there’s not another play. There’s nothing sophisticated in the pipeline at this point right now.

Why did you write “Shopgirl” as a novel first? [!]
Well, I never thought it was going to be a screenplay, that’s why. I had a story to tell as a novel and I told it. I never thought it could be a screenplay. Then I started thinking about it even two years afterwards, the scenes started coming into my head. I thought the images were lovely. Then your mind starts working at night a little bit and then one day, you pick up your computer and you start typing.

What are the major differences between the film and the novel?
Well, in the book there is very little dialogue and in a movie there is only dialogue. You can’t go inside a character’s head like you can in a book. So, I discovered one thing. The character Ray Porter in the book is much more sympathetic than in the movie. Because in the book you can go inside his head and see what he’s thinking, and why he does certain things and how he justifies certain things. How he comes to conclude certain things. In the movie, he just does them and they look a little harsh sometimes. I think I could be wrong. When the movie’s over, it’s a whole different animal.

Did you pick out Claire Danes for that part?
Yes, she’s been fabulous. I can’t believe her emotional intelligence at her age, 24. We’re two weeks from finishing the movie, so it won’t be ready to be seen for six months.

Do you still have time for your music?
Playing the banjo? Yes. I play almost every day, or try to. Sometimes I get together with friends. It’s hard. I play with Billy Connelly. There are a few of us. We’ve played before. Kevin Nealon plays the banjo.

Is this how you thought your career would pan out? Are you blown away by it?
Yes, I am. When I first did my standup act…And you think you’re over. 2003 and I’m still here.

Two years later, I’m ready for Shopgirl, and while the trailer makes me a wee bit nervous (Jason Schwartzman, styled as he appears to be here, is a laughable rival for Martin at any age—I know he’s supposed to be a lost soul, but this is going too far), I liked the book a lot. I would post my Newsday review of it, but I can’t find it in the pile o’ clips. Anyway, I liked it, and I’m always willing to give adaptations a try on their own terms; as the columnists at The Nation like to say shortly before press time, conclusion TK. In the Believer interview Martin says, “Because you don’t know if it’s the corniest thing in the world until you put it out there in the world.” That’s pretty much my motto.

Memo to Jason Schwartzman’s haircut: No.

Categories: Movies, Books, NYer, Martin

Overheard in New York continues, day after day, to be brilliant. It’s the best wikipedia I can think of to describe exactly what living as a New Yorker constantly jammed into close quarters with other New Yorkers is like, via the inane and insane and witty and alarming conversations happening on every subway and every corner as we speak. It should be required reading for anyone trying to write fiction or screenplays about New York, in particular. Or trying to govern it. It would be seriously foolish not to read it if you have any interest in how this city functions and the language it functions in. A few recent examples of the city’s contributions to Michael Malice’s sincerely malicious, yet just as sincerely humble and grateful, project (MM’s heds omitted; you can go snicker or grimace at them on the site itself):

Man: Oh, man! Where have you been all my life?…Can I borrow your lighter?
Woman: Oh, thank goodness. I was like, “I’m flattered, but gay.”

—57th & 5th

Girl #1: Oh my god there’s too many people in this elevator! There’s only supposed to be 10 people!
Girl #2: It’s OK, I’m skinny. In my own reality I’m actually only half a person.

—Hotel Gansevoort, 9th Avenue

Black chick: Yeah, I broke my sister’s knee with a baseball bat.
White chick: Wow, me and my sister had some bad fights but yours top all our fights. You must really hate each other.
Black chick: No, I did it out of love.
White chick: What do you mean?
Black chick: My sister’s in the Army Reserve. They called her unit up to go to Iraq. I hit her on purpose so she wouldn’t have to go. I had to hit her twice to make sure her knee was broken.

—Tillary Street, Downtown Brooklyn

There is a Buddha statue on the counter.

Teen girl #1: Wow, she has weird nipples.
Teen girl #2: I think it’s a guy.
Teen boy: That’s Gandhi. Duh.

—99 cent store, Hylan Boulevard

Dad on cell: So did they give me a credit?…What? It just says “from the New York Times” and not “from Jesse McKinley of the New York Times“?

—18th Street between 5th & 6th

Guy: You know how, like, with alcohol they require ID for proof of age? They should really do that with bikinis also.

—Great Lawn, Central Park

Guy: What book is that?
Girl: The new Harry Potter; it’s the 6th of his 7 years at school.
Guy: 7? Shit. If that author was smart, she would have made high school 10 years.
Girl: Huh?
Guy: Yeah. And that bitch was homeless when she wrote those books.

—F train

August weeks like these make Melville mindsets inevitable. Recall:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

No need to knock off hats, or kneecaps for that matter. Take to the spiteful/generous refuge of Overheard instead. Overheard, c’est nous. Someday, we’ll all see ourselves quoted there. In fact, it brings the city together. There’s a lot of profanity, true. We’re good at that.

Update: Esteemed emdashes reader Julia S. reminds me that Overheard co-creators Malice and S. Morgan Friedman were on the Brian Lehrer show not long ago. Did WNYC turn into Howard Stern for an hour? Let’s find out. Here’s Malice: “If you’re a girl who goes to NYU, and you’re on your cell phone—I always walk in step right behind her, because I know it’s going to be gold.”

Bar Gossip [painting, Brent Morrison]

What’s talent like yours doing in a movie like this?

Here’s my pal Jasmin Chua’s voting off the island of Logan’s Run: The Steve Buscemi Years, I mean The Island, which, as I explained recently, is the best possible summer movie for you, provided you’re a 14-year-old boy. Scarlett’s lips will forever be in your dreams, and quite rightly, too. Chua:

Meanwhile, Lincoln is spending a lot of time, i.e. enough to set off the facility’s proximity alarms, with Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) whose bee-stung lips are beginning to swell to terrifying, Melanie Griffith proportions. She spouts hokey lines with overly rehearsed, not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman innocence, like “I know you’re lying because your eyes don’t smile.”…. Jordan vacillates between childlike bemusement and childlike trepidation, merely registering, and not reacting to, the chaos on the screen.

If you’re not a 14-year-old boy, may I recommend almost anything else? And actually, if you’re a 14-year-old boy, could ya please rent Lost in Translation? It’s just so good for you.

The Island is out soon, and it’s got everything you want in a movie, like:

• Scarlett Johansson’s lips! Moist and kissable, though you won’t have to see more actual kissing than you can handle. Good (short) introduction to the tongue concept.
• Ewan McGregor with an accent you can understand (for most of the movie, anyway). Don’t worry, he keeps his clothes on.
• LOTS of running. So many chase scenes, dizzying heights, and explosions you’ll lose count, and an awesome sneak peek at the video game.
• Pretty explicit surgeries.
• A crabby lunch lady with messy hair and 1950s glasses.
• A whole bunch of high-tech vehicles, like sort-of-futuristic cars with really slow automatic doors, regular helicopters, and flying motorcycles. Also cool sky-rails and stuff from Metropolis, Back to the Future Part II, and lots of other movies. Don’t forget about Blade Runner and Tron!
• A bad guy who collects modern art.
• A sweet handgun case.
• An extended gag about a fat guy who thinks (mistakenly!) that his normal buddy might be gay.
• Steve Buscemi’s crazy boxer shorts.
• Little mechanical spiders that crawl into your eyes and scan your cortex. Then you pee them out. Ow, dude!!
• Scarlett’s long blonde hair, which is always perfectly arranged like on the poster. And her face never gets scuffed like Ewan’s. Actually, she looks kinda like Pam Anderson here, but younger and way less fake.
• A funny misunderstanding about “taking a dump.”
• Whenever there’s love stuff, a choir sings and a whole bunch of light bursts from behind their heads so they sort of glow, especially Scarlett.
• A cold-blooded, mean black killer, who luckily has a soft heart for tears and a searing memory of his tribal past.
• Some really cool products, which you’ll see a bunch of times because their brand names are printed really big.
• Hardly any gushy character development or dumb female initiative.
• Lots of puzzling plot holes for you and your friends to analyze for weeks afterwards.
• Two words: white jumpsuits.

Best of all, you can get in! It’s rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, some sexuality and language,” but that “some” is really pushing it. As for language, most of it is either science-y stuff or Ewan yelling “Run! Come on! Run!” Sometimes Scarlett goes “Look out!” They made this movie just for you, so beg your parents now to let you see it as soon as it comes out. Comes out. Heh.

From the Harper’s Weekly Review:

TO: Harper’s Weekly
FROM: Jerry Aulenbach

Thanks for yet another informative and entertaining WR. I would like to comment on the following line: “and a grizzly bear killed a woman near a golf course in Canada.” Do you know if that golf course in Canada was owned by Bob from Canada? I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and I would just like to encourage perhaps a little more detail when referring to our country. We know your 50 states, but do you know our 12 provinces?

Update: Emdashes reader Joe Clark helpfully points out that, contrary to the figure in the above Canadian’s characteristically restrained yet witty letter, “Canada has 10 provinces and three territories.” True enough, but I figure crafty ol’ Jerry put in a ringer just to further show up dumb Americans, of which I am half a one. The other half of me totally knew that, though.

To go with your Gopnik on William Dean Howells, here’s another fabulous Dead Celebrity iTunes Playlist from Minor Tweaks, whose blog is the object of my shy and profound affection. This dead celebrity, who also has three names and the initials “W.H.,” is William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of these United States. Here’s one of Harrison’s Shuffle musts:

“All Shook Down” (The Replacements): A song about failure. As someone who was President of the United States for only a month and accomplished exactly nothing during that short time, I can relate. “They shook my hand as I drowned” is a terrific line. Here are the rest.

For further illumination, a pleasing fact from the White House’s Harrison bio:

When he arrived in Washington in February 1841, Harrison let Daniel Webster edit his Inaugural Address, ornate with classical allusions. Webster obtained some deletions, boasting in a jolly fashion that he had killed “seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts, every one of them.”

Harrison later caught an awful cold. They didn’t have echinacea then, kids.

A much more prevalent problem in modern life is iPod theft, which the New York City Police Department would like you to know about. They had an officer handing out pamphlets at the Greenpoint Avenue G stop today, and until I get a scanner I have to just, you know, describe things. It’s called “TRANSIT SAFETY: DON’T BECOME A VICTIM! Keeping yourself and your belongings save within the New York Transit System,” and it goes like this:

NYPD SAFETY TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS

WATCH YOUR iPOD [note tender attention to trademark]

LET’S STOP iPOD THEFT [yes, let’s!]

* STAY ALERT
* KEEP YOUR iPOD…
OUT OF SIGHT
* DON’T STAY BY TRAIN DOORS WHEN USING ELECTRONIC DEVICES
* BE ALERT FOR PICKPOCKETS WHEN LISTENING TO MUSIC [that’s the new Jonathan Safran Foer title]
* CHANGE THE EARPIECE COLOR WHEN RIDING IN PUBLIC

Then there’s some stuff about not getting your cell phone nicked (“Don’t let it drop”), and other useful (“Avoid being ‘bumped'”), romantic (“Stay with others…during off-peak hours”), and wishful-thinking (“Protect your personal space”) tips. But iPod is, as Today’s Papers would say, fronted. What a fabulous advertisement! There’s even a huge photo of one to illustrate the iPods whose theft we would like to stop. You know what they say about those most-stolen-car lists—they make everyone want to go out and buy one. As soon as I have an iPod, I’ll try to be alert for pickpockets. Before that, I may become one. I can’t promise anything.

As for Harrison, a safer piece of equipment for his underground adventure might be the iTurntable I’ve written about before. He’d have to travel to 1959 to get it, though.

Afterward, he could keep going and join New Yorker iPod Guy on his lonely bench.

Update: Here it is in glorious, wrinkly 2-D for all you lovely iPoddies and presidential historians. Click to enlarge, and watch your pockets!

Well, finally! From today’s Times, the revelation of both the item I crave even more than a Shuffle and shepherds Edward Klaris and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, figures as covert and crucial as Deep Throat:

The New Yorker, the weekly magazine that started as “a hectic book of gossip, cartoons and facetiae,” as Louis Menand once wrote, and has evolved into a citadel of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, will publish its entire 80-year archives on searchable computer discs this fall.

The collection, titled “The Complete New Yorker,” will consist of eight DVD’s containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be “every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement,” David Remnick, editor of the magazine, has written in an introduction to the collection.

The collection, which will also include a 123-page book containing Mr. Remnick’s essay, a New Yorker timeline and highlights of selected pages from the magazine, is being published by the magazine and will be distributed to stores by Random House. It will have a cover price of $100, although it is likely to be sold in many bookstores and online for considerably less. The magazine also plans to issue annual updates to the disc collection, and it expects a first printing of 200,000 copies.

While innumerable neurotic New Yorker fanatics have saved piles of the magazine in closets or basements, the few easily accessible archives of the magazine’s contents have been on microfilm or in bound volumes in public libraries. But those media hold little attraction for younger readers, Mr. Remnick said, and too frequently go unused. “Students who rely on Google as a turbo-charged Library of Alexandria feel no more eager to use microfilm than they do to pick up a protractor and a needle-nosed compass,” Mr. Remnick states in his introduction.

The project is an amalgam of technology, stealth, insurance considerations and economics that was first discussed more than seven years ago. It was overseen, and long kept secret, by Edward Klaris, general counsel for the magazine, and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, its deputy editor. In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned.

The magazine’s card catalog, which over time has come to include more than 1.5 million index cards containing citations and cross-references to articles and which forms the backbone of the search function on the discs, was scanned at the magazine’s office in Manhattan after discussions with the publication’s insurance company found the catalog to be “irreplaceable and beyond value,” Mr. Remnick said.

It was only recently that digital technologies evolved to allow for the high-resolution reproduction of small type, making the project feasible, Mr. Klaris said. Digital videodiscs were used rather than CD’s, he said, because much more information can be stored on each DVD. The DVD’s are for use only in a computer drive, however, and will not work on a television DVD player.

A user of the disc is presented with each page of the magazine, which can be displayed singularly or in pairs, and the viewer can flip from page to page through each issue. Alternatively, a user can search on any disc for an author, artist, title or subject or by key words, and then move to the appropriate disc to view the material. Copies of the cover images can also be viewed in close-up detail or in thumbnail collections.

The collection also has one other important feature, which allows a reader to page through each magazine by flipping directly to the cartoons. As Mr. Remnick admits, “Ninety percent of our subscribers say they read the cartoons first, and the rest would be lying.”

Go see the photo of the quite nice design of the DVD package, too. The link for the enlarged photo isn’t working on the NYT site, but so far it looks a bit like one of those old LP boxed sets that teaches you to be a connoisseur. Appropriate.

80 Years of The New Yorker to Be Offered in Disc Form [Edward Wyatt, NYT]