"Conversations with
Steve Martin" presents a collection of interviews and profiles that
focus on Martin as a writer, artist, and original thinker over the
course of more than four decades in show business. While those less
familiar with his full body of work may think of Martin as primarily the
"wild and crazy guy" with an arrow through his head, this book makes
the case that he is in fact one of our nation's most accomplished and
varied artists. It shows the full range of Martin's creative work,
tracing the source of his comic imagination from his early standup days,
starting in the mid to late 1960s through the films he has written and
starred in, and emphasizing his more recent creative outpourings as
playwright, essayist, novelist, memoirist, songwriter, composer,
musician, and art critic.
"Standup is the hardest material in the
world to write for someone else; it's like trying to condense 10 years
of experience into 20 minutes of new material.," Martin says. But
commenting on his fiction writing, he says. "I think you have to be able
to find as a writer that state where you don't know what you're going
to say or what the character is going to say or who the characters are.
That's the biggest thrill of all. When you start to trust that
subconscious thing and you don't censor yourself--just remember you can
always throw it away--that's when the good stuff comes out."
The
selected materials consist not only of pieces focused primarily on
Martin's writings, but also broader profiles and conversations that help
explain Martin's development as a writer within the larger context of
his many other accomplishments, talents, and performance skills.
I
have to say that I am a huge Steve Martin fan. This book just didn't do
him justice. I was bored from the beginning and felt like everything
was kind of thrown together.
No comments:
Post a Comment