Holiday Haul
December 28, 2014 § Leave a comment
For Christmas my wife gave me three Wes Anderson films on Criterion DVD (Bottle Rocket, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Grand Budapest Hotel) as well as the Criterion editions of Jules Dassin’s Rififi and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. I also got some nice books from my Wish List: Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey; The Fun Parts, by Sam Lipsyte; and Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, by Richard N. Goodwin.
The Goodwin book was out of print for a long time and only recently published in a new edition by Open Road Media. A chapter of the book served as the basis for one of my favorite movies, Quiz Show. Goodwin, who worked as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and later worked as a speechwriter for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was the Congressional investigator who cracked open the cheating scandal on Twenty-One and in doing so tarnished the reputation of its star contestant, the Columbia scholar Charles Van Doren. His character is portrayed in the film by Rob Morrow.
I’m looking forward to cracking into all of these.
Neil Serven 
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