James Ivory bitchily settles scores in extract from new book

Reposting the link in advance of the inevitable greying out

Thank you OP

Shia Lebeouf is also too old for the role of 24 year-old Oliver.

It makes is a different movie. Not a bad one, but there's a lot more going on when there's a noticeable age gap between the characters versus them being almost peers, even scenes like Oliver dancing at the outdoor club--Hammer seemed quite old compared to everyone else which made it sort of comical on several levels

Should be a good read; I put a hold on it at the library.

"We get Ivory’s lively renderings of, among others, Lillian Ross, Bruce Chatwin, and Susan Sontag; a too short but still interesting view of a late-career George Cukor; a long and engrossing account of Vanessa Redgrave; and, most surprisingly, a razor-sharp but not altogether unsympathetic profile of Raquel Welch."

R3 Keep in mind it was 2015 when Shia was set for the role - ignore the rat tail, but this is Shia in 2015 - I think he looked young enough for the role.

Bravo Jimmy! Guadagnino is an overacted pretentious hack. He miscast Hammer and he wound up with a dull student film. Loved the "scant black hair" comment..... meow Jimmy.

Seems like a fun read, looking forward to it!

Oh Greta, how delicious that would have been!

“I had—while still acting as his codirector—cast Greta Scacchi as the mother, and she had accepted the part. This didn’t please him, perhaps because he hadn’t thought of it himself. But from the point of view of this Italian-French coproduction she was perfect. She had an Italian passport, she was fluent in Italian (she told me once that she had learned it from her father’s Italian mistresses), and she is a very good actress. But Luca cast another actress for the part and never called Greta or her agent. I kept begging: Luca, call Greta! Call her agent, at least! He would not.“

Handsome ElderGays

Hotness

R6 I do love the comments about the now former-boyfriend of Luca being away most of the time - can't blame him, I wouldn't want to spend time with Luca either. Sounds like Luca has anger issues too.

I do think it's bullshit they weren't providing hotel accommodation for him during production - he's the writer, he had every right to be there

How did he come to get screenplay credit when he got screwed out of everything else?

I liked the callout of this moment:

[quote] my screenplay dated April 17, 2015 [] features Elio’s bare foot moving rhythmically over Oliver’s left shoulder during the latter’s exertions…. Luca Guadagnino’s seemingly decorous panning away through a window from the two boys in bed to some uninteresting trees needn’t have concluded the sequence of lovemaking as blandly as it did.

I’m curious about the financials here. He expresses disappointment about not getting to live in Italy again because he got fired. Can he not afford to go on his own?

Shia would have actually been a good choice.

Who was the aristocratic former boyfriend?

Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, whose great-uncle is Luchina Visconti. Amusing comment from him:

[quote]One who has cinema in his blood: he is the great-grandson of Luchino Visconti, son of the cultured Milanese aristocracy. But he gets annoyed when he hears about lineage, "these are obsolete categories, they don't count anymore." And he made his way by himself, studying at Dams and in the field as assistant to Luca Guadagnino

Great-grandson must be a mistranslation from Google. But he insist he made his own way by being the assistant to...his boyfriend.

Ferdinando is in the middle--cute, quite short...

I love this crack:

I recall my days in Crema with a pang: the lively evening meals, usually cooked by Luca, his [italic]scant black hair flying[/italic],

R12 Because they paid him for his spec script when the financing came through. Writers often get treated terribly.

R16: thanks for the ex boyfriend’s name.

They looked cute together

R17 Very small feet.

Is there any gossip about Luca? He seems quite self-hating, I recall him describing campaigners for gay marriage as being too militant, seems quite self-hating in a Dolce and Gabbana type way.

Apparently he writes a lot about dicks, including his own, and how his father gave his cock the thumb’s up.

“The movie director James Ivory is most closely associated with decorous period pieces, paeans to inhibition like “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day,” so I wasn’t expecting his memoirs to be quite such a “Remembrance of Penises Past.”

At young Jim’s elementary school in Klamath Falls, Ore., after formative comparisons at the urinals, he watched a playmate stick his “cherubic (and uncircumcised) member” in the hillside dirt to demonstrate adult sexual congress. In high school, he encountered “a dangling pink foreskin that I still recall, shaped like the ones on ancient marble statues illustrated in our copy of Will Durant’s ‘The Life of Greece,’” and heatedly observed the private parts of identical-twin male cheerleaders, Ted and Fred, turning “a deep purple” in a tanning booth at the gym. Granted a closer look at Ted’s “heavy, charged-looking” equipment, of the “garden-hose variety,” he felt his “mouth go dry” and his “hands shake.” Furtive orgasms began to abound.

Though Ivory was a 118-pound teenage weakling uninterested in athletics, an approving steam-room glance from his father, who ran a lumber company, assured the son that his own endowment (cut, a distinction of some socioeconomic preoccupation) was more than adequate. By film school, at the University of Southern California, Ivory was assessing with a connoisseur’s air a pal’s “very shapely American frat-boy” arousal, “to my eye the best of the national norm.” How did the English travel writer Bruce Chatwin, a later lover, rate? “Uncut, rosy, schoolboy-looking,” like notes on a fine wine.”

[quote] his scant black hair flying

He’s such a bitch!!

His Instagram account is good. He posted about 15 pictures of hideous designer clothes in windows and remarked “Laughing my way down Madison Avenue”.

I didn’t really think about it before, but I guess being circumcised meant a hospital birth which meant you must have a higher level of income, while a home birth was most likely uncircumcised. Was circumcision even ever part of midwifery?

[quote]Should be a good read; I put a hold on it at the library.

Just what every author wants to hear...

[quote] every author

The cost of printing paper-backs and hard-bound books is prohibitively expensive nowdays in this age when the bulk of the population have NO attention span

Shia LaBeouf and Armie Hammer are the exact same age but LaBeouf looks much younger than Hammer, or did 6 years ago when the film was made.

Hammer has a preppy dad look about him...he looked like he was in his early 30s when he made the film. I thought he actually did a good job but it did upset the "look" of the film having Oliver looking that old.

Shia would have been more convincing as a 26 year old.

Shia would have been great. Prior to total insanity, anyway.

He looks more Jewish, too.

[quote]but I guess being circumcised meant a hospital birth which meant you must have a higher level of income,

Oy.

I found the movie erotic on first viewing BUT it felt creepy after I thought about it.

They just should have made Chalemet a little older and Hammer's role should have been cast younger. There is a weird pedo vibe to the film.

Even the father's acclaimed speech seems strange. The way the actor played it he almost comes off as flirting with Chalamet.

Was the father supposed to be gay too and never acted on it? That's the vibe I got.

Yuck. I need a shower now thinking about it again.

R30 Since for the most part that happens outside of the hospital setting to begin with, I wasn’t really considering Jewish boys in this one way or another, though it is very well known that Jewish doctors in America were an important force for advocating of circumcision standardization in hospital births.

Again, I think Armie Hammer did a good job, but his casting really is ridiculous. He's too old looking and far too conventionally handsome for the role. It really does look like someone old enough to be Elio's dad is fucking him.

I wonder if Hammer got the role because Guadagnino had a thing for him....that patrician movie star look.

[quote] Armie Hammer did a good job

He was gorgeous and I don't why he was wasting time with that weasel-faced stripling.

There's a too brief interview with Hadley Freeman worth reading.

R33 I think people liked the contrast of WASPy Oliver who looked older than his age with the slim artsy Elio who looked younger than his age. Shia and Timothee would be more alike in their looks.

R36 LOL...yeah, some people do like that pairing.

We call them pedos.

I keed, I keed but yeah...a lot of people HATE that pairing for that reason.

[quote] I wonder if Hammer got the role because Guadagnino had a thing for him....that patrician movie star look.

I distinctly recall Guadagnino mentioning in an interview that he thought Hammer had fallen a little bit in love with him on the shoot, and in another how attractive he'd found the latter when first speaking to him about the film.

R22 That's hilarious, and actually impressive that he can remember so many of them at his age.

I really would've loved to see what he would've done as director of CMBYN.

R38 Luca outright said he was obsessed with Hammer, didn't he? It has to be something like that for him to have tolerated Hammer's shitty acting - so much so that Luca had to show Hammer video of other actors to show Hammer how he wanted him to act in a scene.

[quote] The food at his Catholic school was disgusting, but instead of this putting him off food, it made him determined to have “nice things to eat on all occasions”, he writes, and those who have worked with him talk about the delicious dinners he has thrown for them in New York, England, Italy and India. When boys at school laughed at him when he said he wanted a doll’s house for Christmas, instead of feeling shame, “I began to think of myself as something more, in the sense of being distinct and perhaps also higher in value,” he writes in Solid Ivory.

Are we sure his birth family from Oregon, and not from Seattle?

R37 No, this pairing appeals to Fraus! That's why the movie is a success.

It's rather sad this old dried-up queen comes now out of whatever hellhole he's got into (doubt he could get into any other kind of hole, one surmises) to launch one last onslaught upon good taste by drooling all over his, soppy and forgettable, memories about all kinds of phalluses and the like. One wonders if the phallic literary craze even extends to the Turkish delicatessen he used to feast on. And it's amusing he tries to present himself as something of a cultured person by name-dropping Will Durant, but would have he done so had he known of Will Durant's past as a Mussolini partisan? Or how that Jesuit-spawn did not even sort properly his citations, clearly dependant on secondary literature but citing primary sources as if he had consulted them (it makes me sneer the sole idea of that Spinozistic atheist supposedly going over tomes and tomes of Scholastic philosophizing, HA!)... And then citing them wrong! Oh, the ignominy... But of course, Mr. Ivory was only looking at the well assorted pictures of kouros, pais and the such...

R16 In the original Italian it says pronipote which can stand both for grandnephew or great-grandson. We all know Visconti was more of chasing after, not of making kiddos. But I do agree with Lady Filomarino, her own peculiar kind have been far surpassed and have little to offer. These Italian "aristocrats" are a shame to look on as they slug on through all these TV studios grovelling about their private lives, one would never ever confuse them with a Lorenzo de' Medici or Ercole d'Este. Also an interesting bit: -Has Viconti's legacy had any weight on your family? Has there been in your family a producer like Uberto Pasolini or a photographer of fame like Giovanni Gastel? -Sincerely no. The only person in my family that has had any doing in my love for cinema is my mother, a great "cinephile", although she never took me to see Visconti's films. She had always been voracious (quite the adjective for one's own mother), but of new things, and she took me to see them. Visconti I discovered later, after high school and the university... He also shares with DL's fave Connor Jessup a fetishistic fancy for that torturer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. And says this pretentious thing: "I believe in a cinematic nation, made up of affine authors".

[quote] And says this pretentious thing

Meh, he’s earned it.

This is an interesting thread. Please rewrite your post r43. Switching pronouns is arch and fun in a boys in the band way I suppose, and I guess we will have to put up with it until the boomers die off.

R43 calling anyone pretentious is HILARIOUS!

Gurl, your turgid word salad indicates you might need to get your levels checked.

You're babbling.

R46 Nothing pretentious in one's vocabulary surpassing that of a toddler, it's ghastly not everyone's does. And it certainly is pretentious to misappropriate a concept such as that of the [italic]respublica literaria[/italic] and use it for such a debased and artless field as the cinematographic one, and even more so when it's directed at self-aggrandising. But of course, I'm so sorry that my post hasn't been easy for your to digest, next time I will try to insert a few slang words from the "hoods" to appease people of a taste like yours, later mate, as is oft said.

Jimmy sounds like a datalounger.

[quote]Shia would have actually been a good choice.

With the right styling I definitely see potential.

Anybody know why Fernando left Luca?

Ivory would've given us dong and Shia (and, apparently, Timothée) would've been up for it. It was Luca siding with Hammer that prevented frontal nudity, and Timothée following suit.

James Ivory's book is now essential reading, thanks OP. I'm heading to the Union Square Greenmarket tomorrow so I'll be right by Barnes and Noble.

R50 I assume because of the ABBA song.

[quote]Keep in mind it was 2015 when Shia was set for the role - ignore the rat tail

I think I'm gonna go ahead and also ignore the eyebrow piercing while I'm at it.

Shia gives off the same energy as Timothee except crazier. I don't get what Ivory sees in that pairing.

Although I think Armie Hammer is miles handsomer than Shia, I can imagine the chemistry between Shia and Timmy would have been unusual and intense.

Armie is a piece of wood.

Shia makes more sense to me in Timothee’s role, and it would have been a less creepy dynamic to pair him with Armie because he doesn’t seem anywhere near as vulnerable.

[quote]and, apparently, Timothée

And yet had his agent put a no nudity clause in his contract, so maybe not.

I read that Timothee was ok with nudity at first until Armie said no to frontal nudity and that was that.

R52

You'll want to read this book as well: 'James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies' by Robert Emmet Long and Janet Maslin.

It can be expensive to buy so maybe the library. Excellent reading, and "essential" if you like Merchant-Ivory productions.

R50 In the Interview to Garden he said that his partner left him during the lock down. Now when Ivory mentiones his frequent absences, maybe he couldn't stand being locked in house with Luca during lock now, without being able o run around.

Luca was crying in lot of interviews how he wanted him back, but seems it didn't succeed.

Shia all cleaned up in 80's prep, highlights, and a tan. I see it.

R50 Not to be cynical but Ferdinando also finished his first serious film before leaving Guadagnino. He didn't have to be Luca's assistant anymore. Although if he had been always away skiing and things, as Ivory said, he wasn't much of assistance anyway. And he is 15 years younger than Guadagnino, not so promising for a lifelong relationship. However they were together for 11 years.

He is one sophisticated queen from aristocratic family, just for snobbish Luca. No wonder poor cannibal was so fascinated by the aristocrats and artistes he met in Crema. Although rich, his family seems to be trashy, and his wife a baker girl.

Here is the interview he gave promoting his new film.

I want to suck armie’s feet

[quote] Both Luca and I were blamed when the film came out for the lack of male frontal nudity in it. But Armie Hammer’s and Timothée Chalamet’s agents made sure in their client’s contracts that they wouldn’t have to do that. American male actors, with the exception of Viggo Mortensen, refuse to do it, while their European contemporaries fling everything off with abandon given the chance, as earlier films of Luca and mine show.

Read them, Miss Ivory! Read those overpraised bitches for FILTH!

[quote] Shia would have actually been a good choice.

He didn't look American enough. See image at R5.

[quote] my screenplay dated April 17, 2015 [] features Elio’s bare foot moving rhythmically over Oliver’s left shoulder during the latter’s exertions

Holy shit, that shot with Timothee and Shia would have been so hot.

I know Ivory a bit from the Hudson Valley scene. He is … rather a cunt.

R69 How can you get anywhere in showbiz without being one?

Is James Ivory the erudite cunt in R43?

R43 Madame, cancel culture is not so much of a thing in Europe. Pirandello was a fascist yet he is very respected dramatic writer and even the left wing directors putnhis plays on the scene. Hamsun was pro Hitler and he is respected as a classic. Italian poet Gabrielle d'Annunzio was a militant fascist and yet he is thaught in schools. And you know the case of Polanski of course.

I am a convinced anti fascist but I believe that we must separate artist as a person from his work. You would probably have to cut off a significant part of world cultural heritage if you left only artists that are decent people.

Though I must admit I am all in favour of Armie Hammer being cancelled, for the benefit of art.

R43 doing his best Ivory imitation wins first prize in the Cunt category.

[quote]Jimmy sounds like a datalounger.

He's just the right age too.

What's the difference between settling scores and setting the record straight?

R76 Bitchiness.

R72 Both James Ivory and Will Durant are Americans, and I'm precisely pointing that, that had Ivory known of Durant's mussolinian apologies, he wouldn't have name-dropped him. Also, D'Annunzio never joined the Fascist movement nor called himself a Fascist, Mussolini tried to associate himself which such personalities insofar it was necessary for propaganda, just as he being an atheist republican revolutionist came to enjoin his régime to the Roman Catholic Church, the Monarchy, capitalists and landowners and so on. And D'Annunzio I don't think would much be of the taste of most of nowadays neo-Fascists or of the Fascists of old, in one of his works he recalls an experience with a tribad who begins mid-coitus to call him the name of one of her feminine lovers and he responds: "I second her tribadic fantasy. The power of my imagination turns me into a woman. I implore her to call me Sélysette. I am a woman." I can only commiserate these poor students who have to put up with things like these.

And I'm not that contrary to cutting to shreds what you call "world cultural heritage".

R78 D'Annunzio was a much bigger fascist than Pirandello. He was even making imperialistic conquers for Duce.

R79 D'Annunzio launched his "Fiume endeavor" (1919) before Mussolini marched on Rome (1922), an endeavour that ended by D'Annunzio's declaration of war on Italy and ultimately his surrender, the influence such a thing had on Mussolini, the pro-War movement or Italy at large is still being debated, but the immediate result was the demise of D'Annunzio's brief dictatorship over Fiume and the election of a moderate conservative president (which points to the result being a serious blunder for the radicals), but the rocky relationship between the two is well attested, and that Mussolini tried to approach him as a propagandistic move is accepted by most academics.

So he was a bigger fascist than Mussolini. It is not the point if two fascist idiot hated each other, but the point is was D' Annunzio. Anyway, he was a little piece of shit who is not so relevant, but unlike you I wouldn't like the cultural heritage be cut to shreds. Particularly pieces that are of some value. Dostoevsky for eg. The bastard hated everything and everyone except Russians. But does it really matter considering his great literature?

Are you an Italian, you seem to be very much into Italy.

One good thing that Guadagnino has shown in Cmbyn is the fact that a simple country family in Italy still held Mussolini's picture on the wall. Italy was never forced to renounce their fascist past like Germany did. It would really be impossible to see Hitler's photo on the wall, except hidden in some basement in Germany. While Italy relativized the fascist past. The fascist squads were capitalists helpers against worker unions and beating workers in strike in Italy of 60s ,70s, especially in South.

R81 That depends on what Fascism is for you. For me Fascism began and ended with Mussolini, something the dictator of gargantuan chin would have agreed to. But if you mean "fascism" in the vulgarized common parlance, then as Orwell well quipped anything can be (and hence anything was, is or shall be) Fascist (to quote him: It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.). For me D'Annunzio was first and foremost the produce of Nietzscheanism. And if I'm not at all contrary to cutting to shreds this "cultural heritage" you speak of it isn't because of my particular judgings about the ethical character of this or that writer but rather in line with Rousseau's reasons for advocating book-burning. And I'm not Italian, but I do have a particular interest in Italy.

R82 It's not unique to Italy, in Spain it isn't that strange to see Francoist flags, and there's even certain locales whose very thematic revolves around Franco and his régime. Here's the particularly picturesque Francoist pub run by a Chinese.

Fascism has outgrown and is bigger than Mussolini. You can relativize it in many words like many other terms, but we know what it is, don't we?

Eco explained it rather well.

Except Eco never rigorously studied anything. There's people out there like George L. Mosse, Zeev Sternhell, Anthony James Gregor, Renzo de Felice, Roger Griffin, etc. who actually did, and obviously like in basically everything in existence, there's diverging views on what Fascism is. For me it began and ended with Mussolini, centred around his figure, even outside Italy philofascistic movements never failed to render tribute to him, people like Oswald Mosley and so on. Eco on the other hand offers a rather laughable non-academic straw-man for people to lynch, you can try and most probably fit anything into the list of characteristics Eco made, from the founding fathers to Churchill, to Lenin and Stalin, and so on.

Can you go and wank yourself off somewhere else?

You know, I doubt that James Ivory gives a single shit about people tut tutting at his lack of wokeness regarding his sin of banging a fashy.

In his Guardian interview linked above, he’s bemused at the idea of needing to life his life according to approval of others vis-à-vis his relationship with Ismail Merchant.

I mean, come on guys. Think of who we’re discussing.

He’s not a petit bourgeois social climber.

R86 Your words on Eco are your personal ungrounded claims. Ok, I see that you stand on a philofascist point. Book burning and all, but quoting Rousseau instead of some slightly younger guys.

R89 They are grounded in the academics I named, which is far more than the laughable allusion to Eco. And it's even more amusing that your very attitude fits quite well into two of Eco's points "Disagreement is treason" and "Fear of difference". And if you think destroying books is so awfully fascistic, you'd be heartbroken to know that the Allies did all the same when they occupied the same. Except the Western occupation forces are all the more singular since they squashed, rather than burned, these books.

^Change "the same" for Germany.

Yawn.

Sigh....this thread:

While is this thread greyed out?

Because it's linked to CMBYN and that sets off certain DL posters

I finished the book and am glad I read it, but, as reviewers have noted, it's really a hodgepodge of eight previously published articles rather randomly interspersed with bits of more straightforward autobiography. He writes well about his childhood as a "fearful snob" in Klamath Falls, Oregon, but he goes too far back in his family tree at the start for no good reason. His long tangent about the fraternities at the University of Oregon could have been edited down to a couple of pages, but the chapter on his time in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, attending USC's film school, is excellent. He writes much more about his friends, colleagues, and acquaintances (some, like Stephen Tennant, much more interesting than others) than about his movies and the making of them. He is three years younger than Gore Vidal, and at times I was reminded of Vidal's "Palimpsest", which was a true memoir and a much stronger book.

Someone above quoted from the chapter on Ivory's off-and-on lover Bruce Chatwin, who was hot, but, increasingly, exhausting. Chatwin tells Ivory he had spent hours hiking in the Oregon woods, naked except for a wreath of wildflowers hung on his cock, which prompts a doubtful Ivory to write the following reverie:

Had he, was this true? Or did he make it up? Making little wreaths for his cock would normally, for me, who always loved to make things and to dress up, have been the kind of handiwork I might have gotten into and excelled at: helping Bruce make them, then adjusting them, just so--I can see myself doing that, Bruce standing naked in front of me in my cabin, as I make necessary improvements here and there, just like ones made by his Savile Row tailors. ... At that time of the year at the lake there would have been two colors of wildflowers, white and yellow, Laced together, they would have complemented the all-over rosy hue of that blond skin, I would think, looking at the final effect, a good, traditional English cock, all ready for Maypole dancing.

I was madly in love with Bruce Chatwin, I hope he writes a biopic screenplay about his life, such a complicated and complex man and always stunning looking.

Bruce Chatwin = fabulist, mythmaker and self-obsessed liar over four continents.

[quote] Bruce Chatwin, I hope he writes a biopic screenplay

He is dead. He is dust.

R99 He meaning Ivory, who the thread is about, who is an Academy Award winner for screenplay writing.

^ Ivory only adapts other people's stuff, doesn't he?

Whoever those two posters are discussing D'Annunzio, Mussolini and fascism I wish they would have written their posts in their first language. I assume Italian as they were so verbose. That was headache inducing.

Use this , R102.

I wish Bruce Chatwin could have used Google Translate.

Because he couldn't speak Australian native languages he invented this cock-and-bull idea called 'songlines' which the gullible Australians believed was a factual entity.

Ivory says that when Chatwin was dying he asked his wife to send copies of "The Songlines" to him and Jackie Onassis, "fun friends from a former life." Ivory and Chatwin were lovers long before Chatwin became a literary celebrity, and, although they stayed in touch until Chatwin died, they had their differences; Chatwin wasn't much interested in India, and Ivory writes that, "Whenever Bruce, all wound up, spoke of his nomads - as he often did - my eyes glazed over."

[quote] Had he, was this true? Or did he make it up? Making little wreaths for his cock would normally, for me, who always loved to make things and to dress up, have been the kind of handiwork I might have gotten into and excelled at: helping Bruce make them, then adjusting them, just so--I can see myself doing that, Bruce standing naked in front of me in my cabin, as I make necessary improvements here and there, just like ones made by his Savile Row tailors. ... At that time of the year at the lake there would have been two colors of wildflowers, white and yellow, Laced together, they would have complemented the all-over rosy hue of that blond skin, I would think, looking at the final effect, a good, traditional English cock, all ready for Maypole dancing.

James Ivory is a hoot, I love him