When Salinger, a high-profile documentary about one of America’s most enigmatic literary figures, opens in theatres on Friday, September 6, audiences will see interviews with some of the country’s most prominent literati and J.D. Salinger fans. Among them are playwright John Guare, novelists E.L. Doctorow and Tom Wolfe, actors Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, John Cusak and Danny DeVito, and Dr. John Wenke, an English professor at Salisbury University.
Unlike some of the others, Wenke, author of J.D. Salinger, A Study of the Short Fiction, is making his film debut. “I was contacted by (director/producer) Shane Salerno’s office about five years ago,” Wenke said. “I was flown to New York and was interviewed on camera for about two hours.” Apparently Salerno liked what he heard. About eight months later, the SU professor was flown to L.A., met by a limo and taken to another two-hour filming. The American literature teacher and scholar recently was notified that he made the final cut of the movie, no mean feat since, according to Salerno, some 200 people were interviewed for the project.
Wenke’s presentation was “very strong,” he was told, and he may be attending the premiere if logistics and time permit. Salinger’s director/producer and the SU English professor hit it off, and Salerno has agreed to visit the University, Wenke added.
Salinger has been a labor of love for Salerno, who has devoted some $2 million of his own money and nine years in bringing it to the screen, according to one New York Times story. Now 40, Salerno is a movie and television insider, voted by Detour magazine as one of “Hollywood’s true shapers of popular culture.” He started working in the industry out of high school and has written or produced such popular blockbusters as Armageddon, Shaft, Ghost Rider, Alien vs. Predator movies, the award-winning Hawaii Five-0 television series and Oliver Stone’s Savages, among many others.
A recognized scholar on Salinger’s work, Wenke previously has been interviewed by USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, American Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” and even Australia’s ABC Radio National. His was the first book-length study of Salinger’s short fiction. Unknown to many, Salinger served in Army intelligence in World War II, landing in Normandy on D-Day. Before, after and during the war, however, he was writing, even sending stories home from the European theatre. He had his highest number printed in 1945. The war obviously shaded these stories and Salinger, a theme of the documentary, according to the New York Times.
Another early theme of the stories and more fully developed in The Catcher in the Rye was his preoccupation with reclusiveness. After 1965 he refused to publish or be interviewed, living in seclusion in Cornish, NH. Wenke thinks that Salinger would find it ironic and disconcerting that so much attention is being given to someone who died in 2010 at the age of 91. Not only is the “author-in-absentia” getting his own feature-length, star-filled documentary, distributed by the high-powered Weinstein Company; but a 700-page book on his life and work, co-authored by Salerno and David Shields, a New York Times best-selling author; and a special broadcast on PBS’s American Masters as the program’s 200th episode in January 2014.
Salinger’s known literary output is small, but his Catcher in the Rye is one of the most celebrated, influential and, at times, controversial American novels of the 20th century, according to critics. “Salinger is one of the few authors I know of who has actually changed people’s lives,” Wenke said.
For more information, call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.
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