Tag: John Grisham

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Memphis Movies in May Continues With The Firm

Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Usually, Memphis in May honors a country like Chile or Sweden, in the spirit of cultural exchange. But this year marks 200 years since the founding of Memphis, so Memphis in May has officially decided to honor Memphis. Every year, Indie Memphis brings films from the honored country to town, and this year, in concert with the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission, they’re presenting a retrospective of films shot in the Bluff City.

Last week, Craig Brewer’s hip-hop classic Hustle & Flow screened to a big crowd at the Paradiso. It was most of the world’s first look at how Memphis sees ourselves in the 21st century. This Wednesday, Indie Memphis brings The Firm to the Paradiso — the first look a mass audience got of the city since Elvis.

The story of the film begins with a legal thriller by John Grisham, a Memphis lawyer turned Mississippi legislator who pursued an unlikely dream of being a novelist. His first book, A Time To Kill, was a minor hit, but nothing compared to The Firm, a bestseller which earned him a huge movie deal. Directed by Sydney Pollack, the film adaptation starred Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere, a Harvard Law graduate who gets a job offer from a prestigious law firm in Memphis. After convincing his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) to move to the city they know nothing about, he is taken under the wing of Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), a partner at the firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. What happens next is like Training Day, only with lawyers instead of cops.

Producer Michael Hausman, who helped shepherd Amadeus and Silkwood in the 1980s, was instrumental in getting this film in Memphis in 1992, and would go on to bring The People vs. Larry Flynt production here a few years later. He would later go on to work with Ang Lee on Brokeback Mountain.

The Firm‘s plotting is solid, and if it feels a little cliched now, it’s mostly because the hugely successful film been copied by TV shows for years. But for Memphis audiences, it’s not a series of unfortunate haircuts and just the origin of the “Tom Cruise Running” trope that’s interesting about the film. It’s now a scrapbook of what the city looked like in the 1990s. For many, it was the first time anyone knew we had a monorail here. (You did know we had a monorail here, right?)

The Firm will screen on Wednesday, May 8th at 7 p.m. at the Malco Paradiso Theatre. You can get your tickets here at the Indie Memphis website.

Memphis Movies in May Continues With The Firm

Categories
Book Features Books

A Q&A with John Grisham

John Grisham, as we now know, is not just a writer of legal thrillers. Among other excursions, he has written a series of young adult novels, a novel about baseball, a nonfiction book about the death penalty, a novel about Christmas, and an excellent collection of Southern short stories. Sometime, mid-career, he became unpredictable, not just a thriller machine. I suppose we don’t expect writers of bestsellers to tamper with success, to attempt to find the outer limits of their gift. John Grisham is different. So, it was not extraordinary that his newest novel is closer to Donald Westlake than Scott Turow. What surprised and delighted me was that the story concerns a subject dear to my heart and one that has been my livelihood for the past 29 years, the buying and selling of first editions and rare books.

And after reading Camino Island and finding its antiquarian bookstore setting as comfortable as a warm bath — except for the, you know, illegal parts — I formulated a few questions for the author. He was kind enough to craft some thoughtful answers.

The Memphis Flyer: Much of your fast-paced story is set in the world of antiquarian bookselling, especially in its murky underbelly, where stolen manuscripts and doctored first editions are sold. I’m an antiquarian bookseller, though an honest one, and, as you might imagine, I found those parts fascinating. You obviously did your homework. Your discussions among the thieves and fences were peppered with the argot favored by used book dealers. Tell me a little about how you came to write a story set in this milieu.

John Grisham: I have been collecting modern first editions, along with a few older ones, for over 20 years and find it fascinating. I enjoy hanging out in used bookstores and chatting up dealers, and I’ve met some hardcore collectors over the years. Three years ago, during a long summer road trip to Florida, Renee and I were inspired by an NPR story, can’t really remember who it was about, and started kicking around plots for a mystery involving stolen rare books. I tinkered with it for a year or so, and last fall the story fell together. It was quite enjoyable to write.

Have you read some of the bibliophile mystery writers? I thought I detected a clever nod to John Dunning, and his detective, Cliff Janeway, in your story.

A few. Charlie Lovett is good, and he actually read the manuscript for Camino Island and found some areas that needed more work.

Your depiction of the heist of the Fitzgerald manuscripts, which opens the book, is worthy of Donald Westlake. Where do you get your knowledge of spy craft and the tools of high-stakes larceny?

I faked it all. I didn’t want to learn and sound too accurate for the same reason I stayed away from the Firestone Library at Princeton. I don’t want to inspire some misguided soul in need of an adventure.

Your protagonist, Mercer Mann, the authoress suffering from writer’s block, reads only women writers. I liked her a lot though — maybe your best female protagonist since Darby Shaw in The Pelican Brief. Is she based on anyone? And do you think of your bookseller, Bruce Cable, as a charming rogue, a sort of modern-day, bookselling Raffles? Should the reader find him sympathetic?

Mercer is quite sympathetic, especially as she slowly gets in over her head. No, she was not based on anyone.

Bruce is not sympathetic. He was developed as sort of a roguish character. Enough said. Don’t want to give away too much.

And, finally, without spoiling the ending, tell me if you might return to Mercer Mann, the reluctant infiltrator?

I doubt it. As you and I have discussed before, I find little attraction in sequels or more adventures by the same characters. I tend to forget about them as soon as I start the next book. Which, by the way, is clicking right along. Just wish I had a title for it. After all these books and 30 years of writing, the hardest part is still finding good titles.

Camino Island will be released June 6th.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Summer in the South is No Damn Good

CREDIT: Reuters | Michael Dalder

I hate summer. Summer wears denim cutoffs and tube socks. Summer starts every sentence with, “‘At ol’ boy …” or “Hold my beer.” I don’t so much like spring either — too optimistic. But then I see Memphis in bloom, and I feel really bad about dissing spring. But then my sinuses clog like toilets in a frat house and stay that way until October. Summer requires me to take massive infusions of gin and tonics with lots of lime. For the malaria and the scurvy, don’t you know.

I think I’m supposed to be romantic about summer because I’m Southern. I’m supposed to wax philosophical on the perfect tomato, give advice on the best way to shuck corn, and sweat like I’m in a movie adaptation of a John Grisham novel.

I grew up in Jones County, Mississippi, which is basically a swamp full of pine trees and bugs big enough to have FAA registration numbers on their wings. There is nothing romantic about driving from Memphis to Destin in June and murdering approximately 18,493,673 love bugs with the grill of your Suburban. There is nothing romantic about getting stuck to your vinyl bucket seat when you’re trying to get in to Cash Saver and cool off by sticking your head in the growler station. There is nothing romantic about stepping in what you think is a mud puddle, but turns out your dog’s feces has just liquefied.

Summer is the Donald Trump of seasons.

Reuters | Michael Dalder

Surviving summer

My friends up North tell me I won’t complain about 96° and 500% humidity before noon once I have spent a winter in [insert Midwestern state here]. Oh. Yes. I. Will.

One of the characters in The Fault in Our Stars says something about how the existence of broccoli in no way affects the taste of chocolate. That’s how I feel about weather comparisons. I will give them that it is easier to navigate asphalt that becomes melted than the snow that might melt upon it. But do you not get that quilted coats, hats, and scarves hide a multitude of sins? Also, it is always socially acceptable to put more clothes on, but generally frowned upon to take them off.

When Southern people of my generation and older start talking about summer, it’s about catching fireflies or lightning bugs. I’m not sure what the regional differences are as far as who calls them what. I think it might have less to do with region and maybe more to do with whether you sit on the Gospel or Epistle side of the sanctuary. I never had much luck catching fireflies (I sit in the balcony, by the way), which was fine by my mother because it meant I ruined fewer mayonnaise jar tops. Everyone knows glass mayonnaise jars are the Tupperware of the South, and you never have enough of them. Especially now that Satan has decided to make them plastic. You can’t pour up hot bacon drippings in a plastic Blue Plate jar!

But I digress. It also meant fewer impaled body parts due to poking holes in the tops with an ice pick. Not that our mothers would have stopped what they were doing. My husband once, while practicing an adolescent redneck version of zip-lining in his backyard, impaled himself on a tree (Truth. He has a scar on the side of his chest that pairs up with one on the inside of his arm where the branch ran through). Once he severed himself from his arboreal sword, his mother told him to wash his face and put on a shirt that wasn’t torn because they had to leave in 10 minutes to go to his grandfather’s and she was NOT having any of this foolishness like broken ribs or permanent nerve damage. Ah, the good old days!

What I do remember about summer growing up is that there was generally a thunderstorm in the afternoons. We don’t really have those anymore. Inevitably, we would all be hauled out of the pool by teenage lifeguards drunk with power because a little storm would come up. We’d be back in the pool in just a few minutes, where we would watch the steam rising from the concrete and feel no relief in the water because it was just as wet out of the water. Of course, now the storm would come just as we’re all trying to run into Kroger or Buster’s on the way home, and it would just be a pain in the rump. Thanks, climate change!

Summer has many glories: watermelons, peaches, passing off wearing your bathing suit under clothes by saying you’re going to the pool later when you really just haven’t done laundry. But it will always be the season that starts its sentences with, “Hey, y’all! Watch this!”

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.