Now in paperback::

Defining Moments in Books:
The Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Shook the Literary World


Lucy Daniel, General Editor
Cassell Illustrated, 2007

“I started reading The Magic Christian and I thought I was going to go insane … it was an incredible influence on me.” Hunter S. Thompson, a man infamous for shooting from the lip, was not the only writer impressed by Texan Terry Southern’s satire on capitalism: Tom Wolfe lines up to doff his cap and Gore Vidal is on record saying The Magic Christian surpasses Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet.


When The Magic Christian was published in 1959, Southern was already a fixture in Parisian literary scene and had appeared in the inaugural issue of George Plimpton’s Paris Review. The novel, about billionaire prankster Guy Grand who believes everyone has a price – “Grand’s the name, easy-green’s the game” – is a series of outrageous escapades concocted by Grand to expose human greed, buying people off for his own amusement.


Filmed in 1969, and transposed to swinging London, The Magic Christian starred Peter Sellers and other future stars of British comedy, though it deviated from the book to cast Ringo Starr as Guy Grand’s adopted son. Southern’s brush with Sellers led him to scripting Dr. Strangelove (1964) for maverick director Stanley Kubrick, co-writing the counter-cultural classic Easy Rider (1969) with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, touring America with the Rolling Stones in 1972 and writing for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. But it was in the sixties that Terry Southern’s flame burned brightest, propelled by the reception of The Magic Christian and immortalized on The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover, stood beside Dylan Thomas, the epitome of cool in his shades.
(Susan Tomaselli)


Why It’s Key:
Hip godfather to the Beats–along with Gregory Corso he hustled William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch into print–and purveyor of intelligent satire, Terry Southern is heralded as the inventor of New Journalism, the style of writing where the article is as much about the author as the subject, and is best known as a Hollywood screenwriter.

 


Dr. Strangelove to be screened at
The Times BFI 50TH London Film Festival


Summer 2006

Playboy selects CANDY as one of 25 sexiest novels ever written ...


April, 2005

from THE NATION
April 25, 2005

Warren Hinkle’s grand tribute to Hunter S. Thompson defines “Gonzo Journalism” (where the reporter becomes “the active part of the story”) as growing “out of a 1970 assignment I gave Thompson,” for his Rampartsesque Scanlan’s Monthly. Thank God (and Mr. Hinkle) for having the chutzpah and foresight to let Hunter loose on the Kentucky Derby, where he met up with Ralph Steadman. But such editorial prescience –fostering a modern author’s exorcising American hypocrisies—dates back further... Tom Wolfe, in The New Journalism, writes about an assignment that the late David Newman of Esquire gave my father, Terry Southern in 1962: It was the first example I noticed of a form of journalism in which the writer starts out to do a feature assignment (‘Go to Mississippi and see what happens when five hundred pubescent baton twirlers meet in earnest competition’) and ends up writing a curious form of autobiography…. The supposed subject … becomes incidental. Professor William McKeen, Chair of the University of Florida Department of Journalism, and editor of Literary Journalism, (2001), writes; ”In many ways this story [Terry’s ‘Twirling at Ole Miss’] provides a model for Hunter Thompson to follow later in the decade.” Perhaps the term “gonzo journalism” must indeed be reserved for the drugs, guns, politics and iron-in-the-soul agit-prop of HST, and the “New Journalism,” kicked-off by Terry, and carried on by writers such as George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, John Updike, Truman Capote, Molly Ivins, P.J. O’Rourke, Michael Herr, Mark Singer, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Tom Wolfe, will be reinvented by today’s outraged writers and (more importantly) tomorrow's new media makers. While my father set out to “blast smugness and complacency,” I think HST became that impulse. As the neo-con(job) bandwagon rolls along, the two of them must be shaking their heads with increasing incredulity.

NILE SOUTHERN
Boulder, Colorado

March 2005

A dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival 2005:

After "Inside Deep Throat" and "The Aristocrats,"
What Will Be the Next "
Blue Movie?"

by Steve Rosen

* * *

January 2004
Dr. Strangefeld

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Long-Rod Penetrator
By
Alexander Zaitchik
New York Press, December, 2004
Vol. 17, Issue 52


November, 2004:
At a bookstore near you... a-17 page cover story on Terry Southern in
STOPSMILING, The Magazine for High-Minded Low Lifes


A Bombardier's Reflection
The 40th anniversary of "Dr. Strangelove" prompts some Cold War reminiscences.

by
JAMES EARL JONES
The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, November 16, 2004


The Washington Post:
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page C01
Billionaires Run Amok on TV?
Satirist Terry Southern's Wacky Idea for Tube a Reality
By Peter Carlson


Recently Published:

Poe's Seductive Influence on Great Writers
by Burton R. Pollin
Published by iUniverse, Inc., June 2004

Some of the writers who looked to E.A. "Big Ed" Poe and who are discussed in this book include Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Walter de la Mare, Thomas Mann, James Thurber, Herman Melville, Stephen King Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Hemingway.

amazon.com ordering information:




Truth Stranger Than 'Strangelove
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Times,
October 10, 2004

"Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans run amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in American political or movie history. For its
40th anniversary, Film Forum is screening a new 35 millimeter print for one week, starting on Friday, and Columbia TriStar is releasing a two-disc special-edition DVD next month. One essential point should emerge from all the hoopla: "Strangelove" is far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a remarkably fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most secretive chapters of the Cold War."

Punters Back Cincinnati Kid as Best Gambling Movie
September 3, 2004
The Guardian (UK)

"The Cincinnati Kid (1965; screenplay by Terry Southern and Ring Lardner, Jr.) has been voted the BEST GAMBLING MOVIE OF ALL TIME by the people who you might think know best—gamblers."

Read the complete story here!


Read more about
The Cincinnati Kid
here!

Dr. Strangelove Included in
'Best Movie Lines of All Time'
Entertainment Weekly: June, 2004

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room!"

* * *

Turner Classic Movies, "The Essentials"
April 24-25, 2004

Hosted by director Sydney Pollack, this series examines great films of the century.

"Movies that define what it means to be a classic."

(Use the slider at the top of The Essentials' home page to find Dr. Strangelove and the slide show about the movie.)

Premiere magazine, April 2004.
The 100 Greatest
Movie Characters of All Time.
Dr. Strangelove, 1964, at number 75.

* * *

A new film, based on a 1981 Terry Southern story, has been completed.

Heavy Put-Away
or,
A Hustle Not Wholly Devoid
of a Certain Grossness, Granted

was first published in The Paris Review in 1981.

See the first POSTER for the film here...


Movie Review: 'Bad Santa'
12-05-03
"[I]n a tradition of Southern or Texan derelict nihilism
of Hunter S. Thompson, and Harry Crews, and
Terry Southern…"

Listen to film critic David Edelstein's review
on National Public Radio


STRANGE LOVES:
TERRY SOUTHERN’S AFFAIR WITH THE MOVIES

The National Board of Review Remembers Terry Southern
With a Retrospective and Panel Discussion
New York City, November 3
The Lighthouse Theater — read more about it here!

And, read about the
undergound classic END OF THE ROAD,
a featured film at the event, here...

Esquire, October 2003, 70th anniversary edition. Esquire timeline:
February, 1963: "Terry Southern's first piece of reportage,
"Twirling at Ole Miss," published. Shortly after, Southern is assigned to interview director
Stanley Kubrick; interview never runs, but Southern and Kubrick collaborate on script
for Dr. Strangelove, which is released the following year."


Barbarella Selected for Inclusion in Entertainment Weekly’s
Top 50 Cult Movies!

Ranks # 40 in the May 23, 2003 issue of EW!

1968: Roger Vadim, Director

"The sexual revolution had memorable side effects, among them VD and Barbarella. But there’s something endearing about watching a swingin’ 41st-century Jane Fonda cavorting in plastic thigh-highs and trolling the galaxy in a fur-lined starship. It’s even more remarkable when you consider Fonda turned down Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary’s Baby to make it. And make it she did—with an angel! Just for that, this one gets its culty wings. "

SIGNATURE LINE: "I’d better adjust my tongue box." — EW, May 23, 2003


OPERATION STRANGELOVE:
A NATIONAL DAY OF SATIRE AND SOLIDARITY

May 14 — Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's
Democracy Now, interviewed Operation Strangelove
organizer Jen Nessel about the screenings
of the 1964 anti-war classic,
"Dr. Strangelove".

***

Visit some of the sites that noted this historic event,
and link up with the deviated preverts who participated...


May 1, 2003: Garrison Keillor's daily program,
The Writer's Almanac, notes Terrys Southern's 79th birthday.


April 1st, 2003: The Terry Southern Trust is proud to announce that the Terry Southern archive has found a home at the New York Public Library, courtesy of a generous gift from Steven Soderbergh. Mr. Soderbergh is a longtime fan of Terry Southern's and is currently in discussions with the Terry Southern Trust about Terry Southern film projects for the future.

"Terry Southern was an actual genius. His totally unique style and point of view extended beyond just his books and films, and anyone who chooses to explore Terry's life through these archives will find themselves endlessly fascinated and wildly entertained."—Steven Soderbergh


An iconographic painting of Terry Southern has been displayed a numerous art exhibitions and has been featured on several magazine covers.

Matt Aston, a Los Angeles artist and set designer, undertook the painting project in late March.

Aston, a longtime admirer of TS' film work, said his readings of both newly released and classic TS writings served as inspirations for the work, which measures just under ten feet in height. Matt timed his completion of the painting to coincide with the New York Public Library's acquisition of the TS archive.


On Bombing and Turkey Shoots

Putting American Pride to Work...at something besides killing.


GIVE ME YOUR HUMP!
The TERRY SOUTHERN RECORD

NOW DIG T HIS
available in PAPERBACK


"Ten Women to One Man"
—Strangelove Scenario for Shadow Govt. Bunker

Counterpunch has numerous articles about Dr. Strangelove


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