Monday, February 24, 2014

Steven Cassedy's "Connected," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Steven Cassedy.

The entry begins:
The movie version of this book would definitely be tricky. I actually started out with fictional characters as part of the book, each representing a social “type” from the era. Every chapter began with a story about one of the characters, to illustrate something about the topic of that chapter. My editor wisely talked me out of using the characters in the final version—they made the book a little too weirdly hybrid for most readers, she rightly thought—plus the little stories were, well, kind of boring.

But the book tells a number of real-life stories that could make terrific movies—or at least be part of some terrific movies. Perhaps one thing I’ve done in Connected is provide technical advising services for a great big movie that’s set in this era—but a movie part of whose point is exactly that it evokes an era and a place. Think of last year’s Inside Llewyn Davis, for example, which brings you back (with one or two goofs on the part of the Coen brothers) into New York City at the beginning of the 1960s. If you were...[read on]
Learn more about Connected at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Connected.

My Book, The Movie: Connected.

--Marshal Zeringue