“J.D. Salinger Unmasked: Never-Before Seen Photograph”

Some exciting news this week on the upcoming documentary Salinger as this Newsweek article zoomed around the Web and Twitter-verse:

In April of 1968, the stamped date of the never-before-seen photograph above [to see photo, click on link above], J. D. Salinger would have been 49 years old. He was recently divorced, and three years into the seclusion that would span the last 45 years of his life. He has bags under his eyes and grooves in his face but, ever so faintly, he is smiling. The intimacy of his setting — the milky tangle of used blankets and sheets — is offset by the spare thrift of his Cornish, N.H., bedroom, with its humble furnishings: small wastebasket, austere dresser. Bare, blank walls. Pack of smokes. But the most telling detail is on the door, at the left edge: a flash-enhanced glint on the room’s steely lock. It’s a reminder of its tenant’s unflinching mantra: keep out.

But that lock didn’t just keep busybodies at bay. Reader, it guarded something else. Because in a small nook across that ascetic cell of a bedroom, Salinger kept a safe. A packed safe, a safe filled with piles and heaps of unpublished…

Call it a coming attraction, because to know any more, you’ll have to wait until Shane Salerno is good and ready to tell you. Salerno, a Hollywood screen-writer (Shaft), has spent six years and millions of dollars researching the author’s mysterious world — though the details, such as the story behind this photo, he won’t divulge just yet. Like Franny Glass, who clung to her copy of The Way of a Pilgrim as a kind of dog-eared talisman, Salerno has a spiritual relationship with Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He also has rules. “Do not read J. D. Salinger on a Kindle,” he says, with a snort of disgust. “Grab that broken paperback.”

Salerno’s disdain for inauthenticity — if a Kindle counts as such — is more or less his mission statement for what he calls “the very definition of a passion project”: writing, funding, and directing a two-hour documentary, Salinger, and an 800-page biography, The Private War of J. D. Salinger, co-written with David Shields. The pair of forthcoming works are as shrouded as their subject, but Salerno hopes they will be the definitive word on the writer. “We’ve been sifting through all this new material to contextualize this giant of American literature,” he says of the 15,000 pages of interview transcripts and more than 100 personal photos he’s amassed. “You’re going to see a very different Salinger than you’ve read about for five decades.”

I posted here about screenwriter Shane Salerno and the remarkable journey he undertook in pursuing his fascination with Salinger. Here is that original post from January 31, 2010:

H/T to Lee Mathias for the heads-up on this story breaking on Deadline Hollywood:

EXCLUSIVE: Judging by the J.D. Salinger obituaries and tributes, there is just as much interest in the Catcher in the Rye author after his death as there was during his life when he shunned the spotlight for reclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire. Now I can report that Shane Salerno, a 37-year-old screenwriter who’s currently writing Fantastic Voyage for Fox and James Cameron, has directed and produced Salinger, a 2-hour documentary locked late last year after 5 years in the making. Salerno financed the film out of his pocket, interviewed 150 sources, and accumulated so much information that he collaborated on a 700-page companion book with bestselling author David Shields.
The 150 sources interviewed in the film either worked with Salinger at The New Yorker or had contact with him otherwise, or were greatly influenced by him. The famous names include Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, John Guare, Martin Sheen, David Milch, Robert Towne, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, A. Scott Berg, Elizabeth Frank, Gore Vidal, and many other fans, journalists, filmmakers, playwrights, and artists inspired by Salinger’s work.
The film — kept under the radar until now — wasn’t done in time for consideration at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. As a result, the filmmaker hoped to present it at a spring film festival, like Cannes. It will be shopped shortly by WME Entertainment and Robert Offer for distribution and remake. The book, also complete, will be shopped by IPG’s Brian Lipson and literary agent Henry Dunow.

The author of the article, Mike Flemming, has seen the doc and here are some of his comments:

I found the film, which doesn’t have narration, to be exhaustively researched and arrestingly powerful. Most importantly, it answers a lot of questions I and everyone have had about the author. There is previously unseen footage and photos, and a rich depiction of that unfathomable period in Salinger’s career when The New Yorker magazine was able to publish a new “J.D. Salinger” story fairly regularly.
There also are details of: his WWII soldiering in Normandy and interrogation of Nazi prisoners; his love affair with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, and the crushing disappointment of losing her to Charlie Chaplin while Salinger fought in Europe; Salinger’s habit of locking himself away in his New Hampshire cinderblock bunker for weeks at a time to write; his penchant for taking a week to craft a single sentence; the damage his silences caused his family; the futile efforts of friends to re-introduce him to the world; Salinger’s protectiveness towards his work; his refusal to sell anything to Hollywood, turning down 8-figure offers and first-class filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg; his determination to maintain total control over his prose (so that when a New Yorker editor once added a comma, Salinger never spoke to him again).
Even more intriguing, Salerno’s documentary also reports on what J.D. Salinger literary works might be in the famed secret vault, where 45 years of unpublished writings are rumored to be kept.

Leave it to a screenwriter like Salerno to undertake this passion project about one of the country’s most famous — and infamous — writers:

Salerno went into the documentary expecting it to be a 6-month project. But it grew into a five-year obsession. During that time, the screenwriter made several 7-figure deals for such projects as the Fox sci-fi fantasy Doomsday Protocol, and the Paramount/Skydance action-comedy License to Steal. So Salerno plowed several million dollars of that money into the documentary, working nights and weekends, and hiring the likes of Buddy Squires, the cinematographer for every Ken Burns documentary.

“He somehow understood in 1951 the corrosive effect that fame and money could have on his writing. He was singular, and in this Internet age where people pursue their 15 minutes of fame, nobody did what Salinger did: living in the woods in New Hampshire, writing to please only himself. The biggest challenge was, how far do you pull back the curtain on a mythic figure while preserving his legacy? We answered some questions, but other Salinger mysteries will remain unsolved.” The obvious question is: did Salerno get Salinger on camera? He would not tell me. But I’ve learned there’s a 5-minute section of the film that was held out of early screenings for security reasons.

Sounds like an amazing project. Massive kudos to Salerno for his vision, persistence, and guts to get this thing done.

The subject matter of the documentary is remarkable in its own right, but there are also many notable interviews with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Martin Sheen, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Danny DeVito, David Milch, Robert Towne, E.L. Doctorow, and A. Scott Berg, And a source tells me that there will be a big announcement coming within a matter of weeks about the project.

For more of the Newsweek article (3 full pages in the print copy!) and to see the never before seen photograph of Salinger as described above, go here.