Word: normans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...columnist Murray Kempton invented the term "the Family" to describe the New York intellectuals--a half-forgotten confraternity of writers and thinkers--clustered roughly around Partisan Review and Commentary. But it was Norman Podhoretz, in his young rooster's memoir, Making It (1968), who gave the term currency. In the Family (Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg, Hannah Arendt and others), Podhoretz played a noisy, precocious younger brother, an irritant who would not stay put ideologically. In recoil against the Eisenhower inertia, Podhoretz had steered to the radical left by the early...
...Family, politics defined personalities. If one's politics went wrong, friendships might die unpleasant deaths. In Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (Free Press; 244 pages; $25), Podhoretz, 69, has set down a fierce and gossipy record of his expired relationships. His stories amount to a personal diary of American political ideas from the end of World War II to the present...
...keeping with the idea of the class as performance piece, Tatar keeps the lecture lighthearted and breaks up her lesson with intermission playtime. "At 'halftime' we have a trivia challenge-a two or three minute break usually centered on a theme. Once I had the Norman Bates trivia challenge about mothers. It breaks up the tedium...
Still, the movie took a decade to happen. Norman, whose previous films include Cutthroat Island, got the idea in 1988 from one of his sons, who was studying Elizabethan drama, and eventually produced a script for Universal. In 1992 Stoppard--who wrote the movies Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Brazil, among others--came in to do a rewrite. The film fell apart over casting and languished until Miramax bought the rights from Universal...
Though there is no dispute over the writing credits, Norman admits he is beginning to feel "burned" by hearing the movie repeatedly called Stoppardian. He says, "In terms of the story, structure and the language--I accomplished that in my screenplay." But both men confirm that many of the jokes that dazzle past--the Stratford-upon-Avon mug; the pub waiter offering a special of "pig's foot marinated in juniper vinegar served on a buckwheat pancake"--are indeed Stoppard...