Editor At Work:

George Plimpton 1926 - 2003

In a delicious The Simpsons from Febuary 2003, a cartoon facsimile of George Plimpton (guest voice) hosts a rigged spelling bee, and at the episode's close, tells Lisa Simpson, "Now I'm off to go do whatever it is I do." That line aptly sums up Plimpton's borderline media personality as a famous editor or "participatory journalist," and if you don't quite know who he is or what he did, you should. George Plimpton died Sept 23, a low-key renaissance man who filled much of his 76 years editing, benefacting and encouraging some of the best writers in the world with his Paris Review literary journal, founded in 1958, which continues to this day. He once wryly admitted once that the PR is "More respected than read."

As part of the first boho artist jet-set, Plimpton helped ferment the 60's cultural revolution by publishing the decade's groundbreaking poets, playwrights, and screenwriters. He was also a film buff, and his best-seller, "Paper Lion" (about his stint in the NFL) was turned into an undistinguished 1968 film. More distinguished was George Plimpton's support of cutting-edge artists, including ultra-fab screenwriter Terry Southern, whose short stories and interviews were featured in PR from its inception among the cafés of France.

Of major interest to "Creative Screenwriting" readers should be the "Writer's At Work" series, the collected, celebrated interviews from the Paris Review -- perhaps the most insightful and constructive in print, featuring diverse writers like Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Ocatavio Paz, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot, etc. If you're wondering how a screenwriter can benefit from T.S. Eliot's thoughts on crafting poetry, then you're in the wrong article. One assumes (or hopes) that movie scribes love to read as much as they love to watch. Even Stephen Gaghan ( Traffic) once worked on the PR staff, and his movie career certainly didn't suffer.

  A serious film scribe only benefits from learning how Terry Southern developed Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick or how Tom Stoppard loves to combine science and theater or how Lillian Hellman survived the Hollywood blacklist, etc. Many great prose writers toiled in the Hollywood trenches - Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner wrote scripts for Howard Hawks while F. Scott Fitzgerald lost his MGM contract. In these interviews, the authors' amused cynicism regarding "the industry" is instructive, if not encouraging. You learn that even the best writers suffered constant rejection, and their myriad creative process isn't that different from us mortals.

     At the time of his death, George Plimpton was involved in a studio project about the wild genesis of the Paris Review , as well as a film based on his best-selling book about Truman Capote. Hopefully, the Writer's At Work series will also be reissued as it is updated, since this esthetic treasure deserves a wider audience. Despite his self-deprecation, George Plimpton actually did something quite important: he devoted his life and fortune to providing a unique forum that will influence generations of writers.

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