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Who are The
CANDY
Men... |
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Terry
Southern
(1924-1995) began writing satiric, outrageous fiction at the age
of 12, when he rewrote Edgar Allen Poe stories "because they
didn't go far enough". After serving in the Army as a Lieutenant
in World War II, he wrote short stories while studying at the
Sorbonne. "The Accident," published in the premier issue
of The
Paris Review,
was the first short story to appear in that magazine. He admired
and befriended British novelist Henry Greene, who convinced Andre
Deutch to publish his first novel, Flash
and Filigree
(1958). Residing with his first wife Carol in Geneva, he spent
days conjuring surrealistic exploits for trillionaire trickster
"Grand Guy Guy Grand" in The
Magic Christian
(1959) while at the same time writing Candy
(1960) for Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press. He and Gregory Corso
presented Naked
Lunch
to Girodias, convincing him to publish it. He published numerous
short stories in England, France and America, (anthologized in
Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes), and co-edited Writers
in Revolt
(1962) with Alex Trocci and Richard Seaver. After settling in
an old farmhouse in East Canaan, Connecticut, Stanley Kubrick,
upon the recommedation of Peter Sellers, invited him to employ
a satirical touch to Dr.
Strangelove
(1964). A
rewarding period in Hollywood followed, includng writing dialog
for the films: The
Loved One
(1965), The
Collector,
The
Cincinatti Kid
(1966), Casino
Royale
and Barbarella
(1967). Terry helped launch the Independent film movement by
co-authoring Easy
Rider
(1968), and co-producing The
End Of The Road
(1969), filmed entirely on-location in the Berkshires. After
the quiet publication of Blue
Movie
(1970), he turned to screenwriting full-time, working on original
scripts, adaptations, and speculative assignments throughout
the 70s and 80s--using his Berkshire home as a base, with longtime
companion, Gail Gerber. During this difficult period, when films
and "quality-lit" (a phrase he coined) moved from
tome to blockbuster, the IRS repeatedly attempted to reclaim
unpaid taxes from the mid-1960s. He was hired in the early 1980s
by Michael O'Donohough to write for Saturday
Night Live,
and wrote The
Telephone
(1986) with singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. With legitimate
film work increasingly elusive, Terry taught Screenwriting at
both NYU and Columbia University from the late 80s until his
death. His last novel, Texas
Summer,
was released by Richard Seaver in 1992. His novels; The
Magic Christian, Flash and Filigree, Blue Movie
and Candy
are available through Grove Atlantic, and a new collection of
works; NOW
DIG THIS; The Unspeakable Terry Southern, 19501995
is available from Grove Press. |
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Mason
Hoffenberg: Born
in December 1922 in NYC to a well-to-do Jewish family, Mason was
sent to military academy. He dropped out, to the dismay of his parents,
Isidore, a business-oriented self-made man, and Minerva, who exclaimed,
"What are we going to do with the uniform?"! He
attended progressive Olivet College, was drafted in 1944, and
was sent to England in the Air Force. He was in France and Belgium,
and in Germany as part of the occupation army. He had good self-deprecatory
stories about WWII, such as setting fire to the base with a cigarette
butt, being arrested as a German spy, and rolling in collective
vomit at sea.
Conquered
by Europe, Mason returned to France on the GI bill and registered
at The Sorbonne. Travelling back and forth to NY, he lived at
The Alden and decided to become a writer and part of the hip Greenwich
Village scene. It was during that time that he met lifelong friends
Anton Rosenberg and Stanley Gould, and roommate Jimmy Baldwin,
the latter ever successful with
girls.
A
French marriage in 1953 and children settled him in Paris. He
belonged to the Vie de Café and American expat scene with
characters such as Kerouac, Corso, and Burroughs, in what would
be known as the
Beat movement.
With a pool of authors including Terry
Southern,
he wrote for the Olympia
Press
and worked at the Agence France Presse.
In
addition to Candy, he was known for his novels Until
She Screams
and Sin
For Breakfast,
published by Olympia Press.
He
first met with Bob Dylan and Marianne Faithful in 1962. When his
marriage broke up, he moved to London, hanging out with the pop
crowd, and befriending Yoko Ono and Mick Jagger.
In
the late sixties, Mason returned to the States, settling between
New York City and Woodstock. Never short of friends, romance,
and standing invitations, he stayed in Los Angeles for a while,
the only person there without a car, and spent long periods of
time in Mallorca, Spain. Upon his mothers death in 1978,
he returned permanently to his native Manhattan.
He
died of cancer in June, 1986, with his family near him.
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Maurice
Girodias
founded the Olympia Press in Paris in 1953. His father, Jack Kahane,
had published such luminaries as Henry
Miller, Anais Nin, James Joyce, Frank Harris,
and Lawrence
Durrell
under his own Obelisk imprint in the 1930's. After World War II,
Girodias began to accumulate a crew of American and British writers
living in Paris to produce what became know as "dirty books"
under his Traveller's
Companion
series. These small green paperbacks were written in English and
sold mainly to American servicemen and tourists who helped to "distribute"
them throughout the world. But
mixed in with the erotic titles were works which were to become
some of the most important literature in the post-war era. J.P.
Donleavy's The
Ginger Man,
Pauline Reage's Story
of O,
William S. Burroughs' Naked
Lunch,
Terry Southern's and Mason Hoffenberg's Candy,
works by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet,
and Georges Bataille rounded out the Olympia list.
Girodias
was also the first to publish Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
The twp had a long running feud over the book, some of which was
played out in the pages of Evergreen.
Girodias'
article, "Lolita, Nabokov and I" was first published
in Evergreen
in September of 1965 (#37). Nabokov replied in Evergreen #45 (1967)
in his article "Lolita and Mr. Girodias." Girodias had
the last word in his Letter to the Editor, June 1967 (#47).
After
the censorship barriers were broken in the U.S. and in Europe,
Griodias moved Olympia to New York City where it remained until
its demise in 1973. Maurice Girodias died in 1990.
Evergreen
Review on M. Girodias:
http://www.evergreenreview.com/101/articles/mgirodias.html
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Nile
Southern,
(b. 1960), began his writing career in elementary school, penning
such short works as The Abominable Snowman Versus The Giant
Wasp, and Headmasters Head. Son of Terry
Southern, he began making films with his father, by appearing in
them as an actor, at age eight. Nile began making his own films
in high-school, and received a special filmmaking award from Choate-Rosemary
Hall. He later studied film at the UCLA and NYU film departments.
He has published in, and been an editor for, Black
Ice
(Fiction Collective), Open
City
and O-blek.
His
ode to the East Village of the 1980s, Art
War,
appeared in o-blek's Writings
from the New Coast,
and his Cargo
of Blasted Mainframes
appeared in Black Ice. Nile has worked as a film editor and assistant
for Pablo Ferro, D.A. Pennebaker and Jonas Mekas. As a filmmaker,
his work includes a series of portrait films commissioned by New
Yorker cartoonists, and an opening sequence for Mark Amerika's
Grammatron,
which appeared in the Whitney Biennial. Nile became a trainer
for the Montage Picture Processor in New York Citya non-linear
film editing machine favored by Stanley Kubrick and Francis Coppola.
The experience of working after-hours on the machine inspired
a 'screen based narrative'
The Anarchivists of Eco-Dub; A Novel of Convergence',
which is to be published this summer by Alt-X
books.
After
his fathers death in 1995, Nile became the Executor of the
Terry Southern Estatewhich was mired in debt and copyright
disarray. After seven years of probate, Nile helped secure the
New York Public Librarys acquisition of his fathers
archive, and a movie development deal concerning Terrys
literary properties with film director Steven Soderbergh.
Nile
is the co-editor of Now
Dig This; The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern; 1950-1995,
and author of The
CANDY Men, The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel,
CANDY.
The
Anarchivists of Eco-Dub
will be published by Alt-X
Books
based in Boulder, Colorado, summer, 2004.
In
November 2015, ANTIBOOKCLUB.com published Yours in Haste
and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern.
He
is executor of the Terry Southern Literary Trust, and maintains
the Terry Southern website, www.terrysouthern.com. |
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Purchase
The
CANDY Men
at amazon.com
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