All The A-Listers Want To Do Is... Write!
Does everyone have a book in them? These chaps think so...
Ethan Coen
Qualifications For The Job: Together with brother Joel, Ethan Coen wrote the gritty noir Blood Simple, the gangster noir Miller’s Crossing and the neo-noir Fargo. So who better to write…
Offending Article: Gates Of Eden (1998), a collection of 14 noir-ish short stories. Pick of the bunch? The Hendrix-inspired music biz expose Have You Ever Been To Electric Ladyland?
The Reviews: The Washington Post summed it up best, dubbing it a “crisp, comic and chilling” work “populated with dirty souls confined to their own tailor-made hells”. Just like his movies, then.
Redeeming Features: Plenty - the book reads like a collection of the brothers’ prize pitches. Of course, the Coens being the Coens, they passed on all of these filmable pot-boilers in favour of a black-and-white movie about a hairdresser…
Subsequent Career: No further fiction, but Ethan has published two slim volumes of poetry. We also have it on good authority that he and his brother have continued to make movies.
Peter Farrelly
Qualifications For The Job: With his brother Bobby, Peter Farrelly wrote and directed the funny and tasteless Kingpin, the tasteless and funny Dumb & Dumber and There’s Something About Mary which is as tasteless as it is funny. So who better to write…
Offending Article: The Comedy Writer (1998), the not-that-amusing, slightly distasteful tale of sourpuss Henry Halloran who goes to Hollywood to write screenplays but ends up writing a newspaper piece which plunges him into a world of showbiz psychopaths.
The Reviews: The back cover’s misleading pitch describes The Comedy Writer as
“A Confederacy Of Dunces meets The Player”. Entertainment Weekly called it “raw and vulgar” but “surprisingly moving”.
Redeeming Features: It’s not as bad as Outside Providence, Farrelly’s first novel about a father who sends his punk-obsessed child to prep school. It came to the big screen starring Tommy Bone and Shawn Hatosy. No, we’ve never heard of them either…
Subsequent Career: With his track record in screenwriting, Farrelly could probably get someone to publish his shopping list. Still, after the success of Green Book, you have to assume he’ll be away from the word processor for a while.
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