The Brooklyn Paper file / Aaron Greenhood

Tools

Print this story

Facebook this

Tweet this

Digg this

Del.icio.us

Email to a friend

Your name

Your email address

Recipients’ email addresses (Up to ten, separated by commas.)

On Oct. 15, author Jonathan Lethem (“Motherless Brooklyn”) will swap his pen for a projector as the Brooklyn Academy of Music begins “Jonathan Lethem Selects,” a month-long film series curated by the Bard of Boerum Hill.

GO Brooklyn caught up with the busy writer to see why and how these flicks, ranging from Leo McCarey’s 1935 “Ruggles of Red Gap” to John Cassavetes’s 1984 “Love Streams,” made the cut.

GO: How did you pick the movies?

JL: I threw a whole lot of titles against the wall initially. As that list got smaller, I began to look for some kind of internal lo gic or sequence to the films or balance between them that would be pleasing.

GO: Were there any movies you couldn’t get?

JL: We had a close call with “Straight Time,” the Ulu Grosbard and Dustin Hoffman film. It’s very hard to get a screening copy from the studio that owns it. Of course, once I rounded up [director] Ulu to come and talk about the movie, it made an irresistible case to the studio that it was worth loaning their print [which will be shown Nov. 12 at 7 pm].

GO: Do you make it to the movies often?

JL: I like to, but I’ve got a new baby, so I don’t get to see any movies as often as I used to.

GO: And when you do make it, what’s your favorite movie snack?

JL: Popcorn with Raisinets in it.

GO: What are your guilty pleasure movies? Do you obsessively watch “The Breakfast Club”?

JL: I don’t tend to think of my pleasures as guilty. I figure if I like it, there must be some reason it’s good and therefore not shameful. “The Breakfast Club” isn’t a favorite of mine. One movie that was on the list for a while but didn’t end up [at BAM] — and I guess people think of as kind of trashy in an ’80s sort of way — is called ‘Deep Cover.’ It has Larry Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum [and is] one of those endless black-and-white buddy movies, although this is a kind of terrifying drug dealer nightmare buddy movie.

I guess there isn’t anything that risks contemporary bad taste, although certainly the film noirs I’m showing were not regarded as top-drawer art in their day. I’m trying to redeem them.

GO: What about your own books that are being made into movies. You were offering the rights to “You Don’t Love Me Yet” on your Web site. How did that go?

JL: There’s a filmmaker; he made a movie called “11.14.” [He’s] a young writer-director, and he’s the one who’ll be doing the adaptation. With books and movies, it’s often a very long and difficult road to the screen. Not every project makes it. But I’m rooting for Greg Marcks. He’s a great talent.

©2007 Community Newspaper Group