{"id":34315,"date":"2012-06-21T10:50:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T17:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2012\/06\/something-for-the-birds\/"},"modified":"2012-06-21T10:50:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-21T17:50:00","slug":"something-for-the-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2012\/06\/something-for-the-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Something for the Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>I finally got a copy of the movie, which was based in part on a story by Alvin Josephy, and stars Victor Mature as a Washington D.C. lobbyist and Patricia Neal as a bird lover on a mission to save California\u2019s giant condors. The movie is nicely done\u2014I particularly liked the old guy who passes himself off as a retired admiral and goes to all the big parties and receptions in town. In fact he works in a print shop that does fancy invitations, and, over time, follows the invitations he engraves to the parties. And of course becomes the lovable yentl in the romance between the lobbyist and the bird lover.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

But the title and the movie say it all as far as Alvin and Hollywood are concerned. At least that is what I gather from recollected conversations and what he wrote about Hollywood in A Walk Toward Oregon<\/em>. After the War, he had come to Hollywood thinking that there was room to write real movies about the war he and other writers had been through and the problems people were dealing with across the country. He was especially excited about a story he had picked up in the New York Times about black and white farmers working to reclaim depleted Georgia cotton land. There was initial enthusiasm for \u201cRed Clay.\u201d Alvin was sent to Georgia to do research and a co-writer and producer were assigned, but in the end, the story was deemed \u201cnot commercial enough\u201d and abandoned. \u201cHollywood hokum,\u201d he dubbed Hollywood movie moguls\u2019 tastes.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Back to the birds! Alvin\u2019s original story about the condors was called \u201cCondors Don\u2019t Pay Taxes,\u201d because that was the argument used by the oil companies and their lobbyists who were trying to open condor nesting grounds to oil exploration. Alvin\u2019s story detailed the work of a University of California scientist who found that the big birds tended one egg every two years and were very sensitive to human incursion. The movie skimmed the science and concentrated on the counterfeit admiral and the love story.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Alvin pointedly was not the screen writer on this one. And I have to think that his flirtations with fiction\u2014the book novel and the screen plays\u2014were frustrating not because they were fiction, but because they failed to get at the truths that the best fiction attends. His own attempt at a war novel, which Knopf was very interested in its first stages, became \u201ctoo personal\u201d when his first marriage became a war casualty. Later, he would say that fiction writers Bill Kittredge, Ivan Doig, Craig Lesley and others were giving us truths of Western history that the text books were missing. <\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

I know too that he was proud of his work as an advisor on \u201cLittle Big Man\u201d\u2014one of the first screen portrayals to honor the Indian point of view, he said\u2014and that he enjoyed working on documentaries with Ken and Ric Burns and others.  <\/span>Knowing the power and pervasiveness of visual media, I think that Alvin might have been a documentarian in today\u2019s world.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

# # #<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally got a copy of the movie, which was based in part on a story by Alvin Josephy, and stars Victor Mature as a Washington D.C. lobbyist and Patricia Neal as a bird lover on a mission to save California\u2019s giant condors. The movie is nicely done\u2014I particularly liked the old guy who passes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247,1137,1138,815,1136,1139],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}