J.D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye Unfilmable
JA
January 11
Letters of Note has thrown up another unlikely find – this time a very entertaining, curt missive from the notoriously reclusive J.D. Salinger on the subject of film rights. The huge success of The Catcher in the Rye naturally made it great fodder for screen and a large number of Hollywood elite have tried over the years to get permission to make a suitable adaptation. Salinger, however, remained adamant that his book was ‘unfilmable’.
I keep saying this and nobody seems to agree, but The Catcher in the Rye is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade “scenes” – only a fool would deny that – but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator's voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it, his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener, his asides about gasoline rainbows in street puddles, his philosophy or way of looking at cowhide suitcases and empty toothpaste cartons – in a word, his thoughts. He can't legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique.
On the subject of a likely lead, Salinger was equally blunt:
Not to mention, God help us all, the immeasurably risky business of using actors. Have you ever seen a child actress sitting crosslegged on a bed and looking right? I'm sure not. And Holden Caulfield himself, in my undoubtedly super-biased opinion, is essentially unactable. A Sensitive, Intelligent, Talented Young Actor in a Reversible Coat wouldn't nearly be enough. It would take someone with X to bring it off, and no very young man even if he has X quite knows what to do with it. And, I might add, I don't think any director can tell him.
The letter is apparently for sale for upwards of $54 000(US). You can have a read of it in full, here.
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