Bret Easton Ellis

Started by children with angels, June 17, 2003, 08:59:29 AM

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wilder


wilder

Bret Easton Ellis to Make Directorial Debut With Cult Thriller for Fullscreen
via The Hollywood Reporter

'The Deleted' is a thriller about the disappearance of three people in Los Angeles.

Bret Easton Ellis is making his directorial debut with a new series for Fullscreen's forthcoming standalone video service.

The American Psycho author is attached to The Deleted, described as a thriller about the disappearance of three people in Los Angeles. Although they seem to be unconnected to each other, the deaths trigger the collective paranoia of a group of twenty-somethings who recently escaped from a cult.

Ellis, the bestselling author of The Rules of Attraction and Less Than Zero, wrote and produced 2013's Lindsay Lohan starrer The Canyons and has directed two short films, but The Deleted will be his first time directing a serialized project.

Additional details about the project have yet to be announced. Fullscreen is targeting an early 2017 premiere for The Deleted on its subscription video service, which launches Tuesday, April 26. The $4.99-a-month service is going after teen audiences with original scripted programming from YouTube stars like Grace Helbig and licensed TV shows and movies including Dawson's Creek and Center Stage.

wilder

The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast returns with John Carpenter

wilder

On the most recent episode of the BEE podcast he talks about American Psycho: The Musical with Duncan Shiek. Ellis said this:

Quote from: Bret Easton Ellis"Bateman's entire awareness that the society he is a part of doesn't care about his crimes forcing him to imagine that maybe he didn't commit them is a very tricky thing to dramatize on the stage..."

I haven't read American Psycho since I was 15. I don't remember making that explicit connection between the ambiguity of the serial killer aspect of the narrative and the wall street layer, beyond it being an extreme inflation of the depravity of the finance world. I like the way he just described it, a crime unacknowledged as not being a crime at all - what an ingenious narrative device. Dude doesn't get enough credit.

wilder

The latest episode of the BEE Podcast with Moby is one of the most interesting yet. Even Ellis' film criticism, which I don't necessarily agree with, is getting stronger - the connections he makes between the films he talks about and the culture at large more clear and lucid than they've maybe been in the past.

I liked this exchange from the final few minutes:


Ellis: We both left New York after having pretty long runs there...why did you leave ultimately and why did you relocate here [Los Angeles]?

Moby: I was born in Harlem in 1965 and I thought I would live in New York forever. You know, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s everything that interested me had happened there or was happening there - whether it was The Velvet Underground or Basquiat or, I mean, my favorite books were written by New Yorkers... And then, living there in the 90s it was so — it was cheap, and it was dirty, and it was filled with artists and writers and musicians, and it felt so central: you could get to Europe easily, you get get to LA easily, you could get to South America and Asia - it just felt like this epicenter of the world. And then at some point, I guess about ten years ago, well I got sober, and I very quickly realized: New York is paradise if you're a drunk—

Ellis: ...completely...

Moby: ...and kind of a difficult place to be if you're sober.

Ellis: Completely agree.

Moby: So I suddenly realized that my priorities shifted, and I just became much less interested in the— I mean New York is a wonderful place I don't want to demean it or denigrate it or slander it, but...it is deeply provincial, it looks in at itself. It's essentially like a walled medieval city except the wall is water. So...New York loves New York. And New York loves the things that New Yorkers make. And they make amazing things, but as time has passed I think I just became more interested in the rest of the world. And LA, apart from the fact that it's warm in the winter, is filled with such baffling odd people. We have David Lynch, and we have Shepard Fairey, and we have Kenneth Anger. There's such an incomprehensible strangeness to Los Angeles. And even the geographical elements: the fact that we have 2 million acres of mountainous state parks in LA County, and we have desert, and we have bizarre beaches, and we have Latino culture and Russian culture, and so much oddness.

And I think, the main thing that keeps me here — it's like two things. One: comfort, because you can be very comfortable here. For what you spent on a studio apartment in New York you can have a four-bedroom house with a pool and trees outside, so that's nice, but there is a sort of byzantine strangeness to Los Angeles that never bores me. Even if LA is boring, at its core I'm not bored because I know that something odd, wrong, complicated, and baffling is going on somewhere. And to be a little esoteric about it, I like the fact that LA is one of the only cities on the planet that is surrounded by non-human environments. You know, like, when you're in Europe, if you're in Brussels, or you're in New York, or you're in Milan or you're wherever, all your neighbors are human. You throw a rock and you hit another city. So you start having this very anthropocentric view of the universe. LA: you drive a few miles in one direction and you are in a desert that does not support human life that is millions of acres large. And there's something existentially relevant and fascinating about that.

WorldForgot

Does anyone have their hands on Roger Avery's Glamorama material?
Let me know!

(I'm awful at keeping up with podcasts, but every year I end up rereading Glamorama, which leads into The Rules of Attraction, and that loops me toward Lunar Park, and before I know it... time to read Glamorama again.)

wilder


jenkins

lol he did just go ahead and publish a rant book. he's literature's Henry Rollins. both those guys are great and i like their early stuff

thanks for the summary info wilder i read it

Drenk

What pisses me off about that kind of response from Bret Easton Ellis is that it's as dumb as the dumbest reaction from the Democrats toward Trump.

Even if that interview doesn't seem fair. But how can you comment the coverage of a politician if you don't care about politics? The coverage is very important in politics now. The coverage was very important for Trump.

Ellis lives in an a-political world—he has enough money not to be concerned by anything, "job creation", the "economy", whatever, he probably believes that we're creating jobs by destroying jobs—that is weirdly obsessed by politics, so what is he talking about, really?

There's a difference between being concerned by the overreaction to racism—look, I'm not saying that racism isn't that bad, but that we should be seriously thinking about all the things that are happening, knowing that the president is racist doesn't mean that we should spend all our energy being scandalized by every racist thing he says, especially when he's mostly helping his rich friends—and saying that Roseanne Barr might not have know that Valerie Jarrett was black...I wonder what he's thinking?

The sole focus being "vote him out of office" is also reductive, yes. And then? Yes, it's a first step. But Trump being in that office isn't an accident. And then what? Obama 2? Clinton 2? And we keep the same world? The president is not racist but the corporations can be quietly racist? Okay. Fine. Whatever.

The energy should be wider.

Anyway. Here is the interview:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-youre-overreacting-to-donald-trump?utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR3NK9V5JukVk3IksmFlHL8YZusdANvITzAWPFxsCNrhY7htZgHi0iJWV1w&fbclid=IwAR3_xvFWbxb-StNY0ii1JbVb-2RM8ntekAq7R-ykK-I22ErhcC8tiU19wkk

Ascension.

Alethia

Yeah, I love BEE, but not when it comes to politics - he's always struck me as out of touch in that regard. I don't quite know why he feels the need to do what he's doing right now, it's not a good look for him. He tends to come off more nuanced on his podcast, even when saying things I disagree with, which makes it a tad puzzling how unprepared and ignorant he sounded in the above linked New Yorker piece (though I can't say the interviewer seems terribly acquainted with journalistic integrity, this dude clearly had it out for him from the beginning - yet it's being widely praised, at least on Twitter, because I guess tribalism?)

Stick to movies and books, Bret.

Drenk

He basically wrote a book because he's annoyed that he doesn't like his boyfriend as much now that Trump is president. Look: if he had written a book portraying millennials like his boyfriend, and I'm sure we're talking about a specific and fascinating kind of rich leftists, that would be interesting. But can he? I'm not a fan of his work. In his description of an empty world he forgets that some part of humanity is still struggling inside us. Or maybe he's just not that good at capturing humanity.
Ascension.

Alethia

I love his first few books, especially American Psycho - his stuff after that ranges from interesting to dull. He says he's pretty much done as a novelist. It's his podcast that I've really fallen in love with over the last few years, primarily when it sticks to movies (and literature to a slightly lesser degree), less so when it veers into politics. I won't bother reading White because he himself has said it's almost entirely transcribed from various podcast monologues, and I just don't see the point.

wilberfan

I've never read any of his books--but I agree about the podcast.  Our taste in film overlaps to the extent that I often find his film commentary very interesting and illuminating.  And the political commentary is just unpredictable enough to be interesting as well.  I have a friend that hated his interview with Leslie Ann Warren because he kept interrupting, but that didn't bother me.

Alethia


Drenk

I finished White, which I thought was a great and engaging read, and decided to read reviews to see how they treated the arguments made in the book—how naive of me...The review from The Guardian is especially shameful. It contains errors, it has random quotes without the context, in order to make it sound ridiculous.

But I also found an article about these non-reviews. It's quite interesting. I like what it says about reviewers using a Twitter voice to dismiss what they're reviewing. It seems insane to me that you can write a review in The Guardian without doing the work; because, look, a real negative review of White would be fascinating. The fact that Ellis says, himself, that he doesn't care about politics is helpful, he analyzes the reactions of an elite—the one he's living with, the one he's a part of—and that's fascinating—but the actual effects of politics on the world don't register to him, it's all virtual. And yet, what he describes is political, too. He's in the bubble and outside of the bubble—so he can see things, or be a witness for us, while having his blindspots. Anyway, I'm annoyed that it did not spark discussions; instead, it was just mocked. Ellis has a Twitter voice that I find distateful, but his essay voice is not his Twitter voice; other writers should be aware of that distinction in their work...

Here is the article about the reviews: https://thewire.in/books/bret-easton-ellis-white-review/amp/

tl;dr What I mean is that what made the reading exciting was as much the part I strongly agreed with than the parts I disagreed—it was serious and funny, but not annoying even if I rolled my eyes twice.
Ascension.