Ford's 'Sportswriter' to HBO

HBO Films will turn a Pulitzer Prize-winning book trilogy by Richard Ford into "The Sportswriter," a six-hour miniseries to be directed by James Mangold.

Mark Bomback will write all six hourlong episodes and use all three titles in the trilogy: "The Sportswriter," the Pulitzer-winning "Independence Day" and "The Lay of the Land."

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117964247.html?categoryid=14&cs=1

 

Wow. Not sure how I feel about this. Can the mind of Frank Bascombe translate to the small screen? The only reason I'm optimistic is that it's HBO...

 

I didn't like the book. Ford's dialogue is fucking painful to read. Dull, dull story, too. Feh.

 

I didn't like it either, and I'm a readoholic.
Bought it because of the title, obviously, and after 20 pages, I flat gave up, something I rarely ever do.

 

I read only The Sportswriter out of the trilogy. It was a well-drawn portrayal of a dissolute dude. Didn't particularly made it a pleasure to read.

 

I gave up quickly, too. But I do that a lot. If the book doesn't grab me, I've got other things to do.

 

Maybe part of the episode will explain what it means to be a D_B
http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/41070/

 

Ouch! (But should this really be a 'Journalism topics only' thread? I think not.)

 

Ehhh, perhaps.. but it was also posted six hours earlier...

 

Seems like "Anything Goes" material to me.

One of the things about the way I read novels is utterly subjective and personal and has nothing to do with the Standards of Art. I have to like at least one character in a novel in order to be interested. The novelists I like best- Garcia Marquez, Algren, Allende, Dostoevsky, McCullers, Henry Miller- might have very different types of work but they all present characters that capture my attention and make me care.

Ford's protagonist is a douche, and so are most of the people with whom he interacts. He's a semi-amoral bourgeois douche in a world of semi-amoral bourgeois douches. I can't begin to care about any of them. Maybe if I were a 9-to-5, suit-wearing type from the Northeast, I'd "get it" as far as Ford goes. But as a working-class Southerner, I find his characters alien and unappealing...and their stories hopelessly uninteresting.

 

Which is rather interesting because Ford, I believe, is from Mississippi -- or at least spent a lot of time there.

 

That's true about Ford's Mississippi ties. I've only read The Sportswriter...I know nothing of Ford the man or his other works.

I don't mean to sidetrack the discussion onto my own personal preferences, which aren't relevant. But for the record, there are types of bourgeois Northeastern stuff that I do like. Hell, I think Woody Allen films are great fun. I do like the tweedy, intellectual side of the Northeastern upper-middle class culture. But the dissolute, suburban, Country Club-nihilist schtick is what I find both repulsive and dull.