Monday, March 24, 2014

Ron Leshem at JPL

March 24, 2014 at 7:30 PM - The Mervin (Mesh) Butovsky Memorial Lecture presents Ron Leshem on “Israel and Hollywood” (in English) Ron Leshem will speak about Israel’s growing relationship with Hollywood over the past 19 years, and about his own award-winning novel Beaufort, which was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film of the same title. Leshem will also discuss shows like In Treatment and Homeland, both adapted from Israeli television, and how these shows are paving the way for Israel’s young TV industry to expand worldwide. As an executive for one of Israel’s main TV networks, Leshem oversaw the development of Homeland and many other hit shows and is currently developing adaptations for his own shows as a writer for NBC Universal. He will share his views on what makes a format universal, how to transfer a show to a foreign audience, and what everyone is looking for as “the next big hit.” Ron Leshem is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and a winner of the Sapir Prize – Israel’s top literary award. Introduced by B. Glen Rotchin, Montreal novelist and book reviewer. Details here

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Happy Birthday Philip Roth

Whatever you might say about Roth's portrayal of women, or that his adult male characters suffer from arrested development, no American writer has written more powerfully and honestly about the experience of male-adolescence and growing up in the post-war period (the following taken from The Writer's Almanac):

"Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. After the victories of an exuberant and spirited childhood — lived out against the dramatic background of America's participation in World War II — I was to cool down considerably until I went off to college in 1950. [...] From age 12, when I entered high school, to age 16, when I graduated, I was by and large a good, responsible, well-behaved boy. [...] The best of adolescence was the intense male friendships — not only because of the cozy feelings of camaraderie they afforded boys coming unstuck from their close-knit families, but because of the opportunity they provided for uncensored talk. These marathon conversations, characterized often by raucous discussions of hoped-for sexual adventure and by all sorts of anarchic joking, were typically conducted, however, in the confines of a parked car — two, three, four, or five of us in a single steel enclosure just about the size and shape of a prison cell, and similarly set apart from ordinary human society."