Word: didions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Directed by FRANK PERRY Screenplay by JOAN DIDION and JOHN GREGORY DUNNE...
Raymond Chandler knew the territory well, Nathanael West wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has recently taken the measure of the neon void with such savage precision as Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays was a novel about a young actress, Maria Wyeth, crumbling into the pieces of a psychic jigsaw. Didion drew the Southern California landscape with poisonous accuracy, using its shifting scenes to delineate states of an increasingly troubled mind...
...trouble is that half the cars on Western highways these days must have writers of one sort or other behind the wheel. There is getting to be rather a literary traffic tangle in which only the best drivers-Joan Didion on the Los Angeles freeways, Ross Macdonald in the canyons, Larry McMurtry on the asphalt-beribboned deserts-can make the trip worth...
...long last she may have found a script that fits her talents. In Play It As It Lays, a movie currently being adapted from Joan Didion's novel, Tuesday portrays Maria, an actress in search of a breakdown in the vast emptiness of Southern California. "She knows the role so well she could phone it in," says Director Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife). "I tested hundreds of girls for the part, but I always knew it had to be Tuesday...
...Carmen McRae, by the air whistling to get out the window crack, by the distant hum of the tires, zip past the palms and the houses at a standstill in the sun and float on the air on your shocks, free, rootless, just going-like the girl in Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. You become a skier out here, your times off the freeway being mere chili stops at the bottom, breathless, charged, waiting for another move...