In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay about how more and more novelists are selling the rights to their work to cable networks — and in many cases, even helping adapt that work, as well. Since many of the projects I mentioned remain in the pilot stage (and since the odds that a pilot makes it to air remain terrible), it was tough to get interviews. But I did talk at length with Jonathan Ames, a novelist who’s already adapted his work into a show, Bored to Death, that just finished its third season. Ames made for a great interview — a metaphor machine who balanced deep knowledge with deep-ish pessimism. Below are some interesting quotations I couldn’t fit into the essay.”

On a TV show’s financial benefits: “I got paid much more for the show’s pilot script, which took me six days to write, than I’d ever gotten for any of my novels. The economy of scale is just absurd.”

On a TV show’s collaboration: “HBO was very kind to me — they gave me a learner’s permit. . . . I don’t have much time to sit on a script before I turn it over to other people. It’s a very vulnerable moment. It forces you to be imperfect in front of other people. I need all these people to be, in a sense, editors. Sometimes it’s difficult. But most of the time everyone makes it better.”

On the value of TV versus literature: ”In all the media, my goal is to entertain and amuse — to, for a moment, give someone some relief, perhaps, and to make someone feel less alone. . . . There are certain things I smuggle into the show,  things that you might not find in a typical comedy. I want there to be some gravitas, some sorrow and despair — for a moment, it’s not clearly just a joke, and that feels more in the realm of what I can do in my novels and my nonfiction. But prose makes it much easier to toggle back and forth from lightness and darkness.”

On returning to writing: “Over the course of writing the show, I’ve written a handful of essays. I’ve kept my hand in prose. But I’d like to return to books, if I’m lucky enough to be able to. I can imagine a future critic saying, ‘Ames has clearly been writing for TV.’”

In this week’s New York Press, I’ve got a story about Mark Twain’s long-forgotten residence in Greenwich Village—and the 1954 crusade to save it. I first discovered this while doing some research (on one of these) for grad school stuff, and I quickly became obsessed with it. As you’ll see in my Press story, though, things got really interesting when I tracked down one of the story’s main players—a British film director who happens to be celebrating his 99th birthday this week. (This week also happens to be the centenary of Twain’s death; they just missed each other.)

Anyway, the story’s obviously a New York-centric one, so, in deference to all the non-New Yorkers out there, I thought I’d share some photos I took while reporting this. Up top is the plaque—still there at the corner of Fifth and Ninth in Manhattan—that the Greenwich Village Historical Society set up in 1925. (Clara, Twain’s daughter who put up the “NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10 P.M.” sign, was at the ceremony.)

Here’s another 1840s townhouse a few blocks over from the site of the Twain House. (The Twain House, thanks to its architect, included more flourishes than this house: stained glass windows, Romanized details, and a whole lot of wrought iron.)

Here’s the faux-historical sign the developers slapped on the “tall ultramodern apartment building.”

And here’s Twain at 21 Fifth Avenue, chalking his cue. There are a ton of great photos like this in Paine’s three-volume biography, which is available on Google Books. Here’s the third volume, in which, at several points, Paine signals that Twain was a bit of a cheater.

Tim Monich has five times as many IMDB credits as Jason Schwartzman, but we know for whom Brooklyn tolls. This week’s New Yorker profile of Monich won’t change that, of course, but it does offer a riveting look at the world of Hollywood dialect coaches.

Movie accents are one of those things we don’t notice until they go bad, but, as Alec Wilkinson reports, Monich has worked with tons of stars, including Hilary Swank in Amelia and Matt Damon in Invictus. Whatever the role, Monich can rely on his incredible archive of sound recordings—more than six thousand of them, all filed in boxes bearing names like “USA A-H” (American dialects, Alabama to Hawaii).

The world of elite dialect coaching, as you might guess, is a small one; Monich received his start from a student-of-a-student-of-a-student of the man who provided the inspiration for Henry Higgins. (The New Yorker identifies Higgins as the Pygmalion character, but here, at The Rumpus, we’re on fine terms with My Fair Lady.) Thankfully, Wilkinson walks us through the entire process, showing how, under Monich’s aegis, Brad Pitt perfected the speeches memorialized this summer in the Inglourious Basterds trailer. Sooooun gud?

It’s all accessible––Wilkinson spares us any IPA or epiglottal consonants––and it’s all fascinating. Where else will you hear Gerard Butler compare Speak with Distinction to Ulysses? In fact, the whole thing recalls Rebecca Mead’s great 2003 profile of Jaime Pressly, “The Almost-It Girl.” (Like the Monich piece, it sits behind a subscription wall; what’s with The New Yorker burying its best Hollywood-from-the-margins stories?)

But there’s one key difference between Wilkinson’s profile and just about any other piece of Hollywood journalism, and I think it imbues the profile with much of its oomph. In no other story quoting so many celebrities—and Pitt/Damon/Swank are only the start—do they all talk about one relatively average guy. It becomes a weird, inverted world where Leo and Liam rub elbows with Monich and the regular folks he interviewed while building his archive. For a moment, or maybe just for an unruly vowel, the actor-viewer relationship reverses.

On Friday night, and in preparation for Where the Wild Things Are, I rewatched Spike Jonze’s first feature, Being John Malkovich. What struck me was not the film’s final childlike shots or how its puppet shows anticipate both Christopher Walken and those expensive, “absurdly heavy” monster suits, but something else—namely how goddamn much John Cusack looked like David Foster Wallace.

In the film, Cusack plays a character named Craig Schwartz, and, to me, at least, he bears an uncanny resemblance to DFW circa Charlie Rose. I can’t find a good image of Cusack-as-Schwartz online, but you’ll have to trust me. Both men sport the same long, thick, unmanaged hair; the same weak, stubbly jaw; the same tight white shirt and skinny red tie; the same unhip round glasses; and even some of the same facial tics (especially once Cusack discovers “the portal”).

Wallace recently got his own film treatment—for the titular sections of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, adapted and directed by Office-ite John Krasinski—and, thanks to it, we can connect these dots. Krasinski to Dave Eggers (Away We Go), Eggers to Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), Jonze to Cusack—no Kevin Bacon needed![1] But I’m starting to sound far more glib than I felt after finishing Being John Malkovich. In fact, for me, the Wallace/Cusack effect quickly went from oddly creepy to kind of sad. But then I decided to rewatch that Rose interview, where guest and host meander through A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Strangely, the real dead person cheered me up where the silly doppelganger got me down. And I think that’s because the lo-fi Wallace interview stands as a better piece of visual entertainment than Being John Malkovich or Where the Wild Things Are or just about anything else—and that’s because of what Wallace says.

Watch that interview. Read the collection’s essay on television and contemporary fiction. Cipher on the ghostly parallel to Cusack (the trailer’s here). Just remember that DFW’s body of work lives on, and that it’s a little less bitter on each return.

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[1] Being John Malkovich‘s original script did call for Bacon to play one of Malkovich’s friends.

Today, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies opens nationwide, and I’ve got a couple of new stories tying into it.

First, there’s this Cincinnati CityBeat cover story on “the Dillinger legend”—and by that, I mean not only the historical person, but also the previous movies about (and by!) Dillinger and the Depp-mania surrounding Public Enemies‘ filming in small towns like Crown Point, Indiana. (I have yet to see the movie or read many reviews, and I’m actually a little leery of the Depp casting, but count me in for Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover.)

Second, and spun off from the first, I’ve got a review-slash-essay at The Rumpus of Dillinger: The Untold Story. It’s the first book you should read if Public Enemies piques your interest about Dillinger and his era.

So, if you need help planning your Fourth of July weekend: read the CityBeat story, watch Public Enemies, then read my book review and its subject. (For extra credit: there’s a lot of great stuff on 1930s gangster movies I couldn’t squeeze into the CityBeat story, but I highly recommend this NYRB essay on “pre-Code” Hollywood. Well worth the $3 micropayment.)

Recently, Hulu started streaming documentaries on its site—something Netflix has been doing for a while now. In fact, Netflix offers more documentaries than any other genre, and I’ve got some thoughts about that, and a film titled The Education of Shelby Knox, over at Patrol Magazine.

Pull quote:

Documentarians often struggle with distribution: there’s a whole world of quirky subjects and cheap camcorders, but how to get the finished product to the masses? Netflix provides a cheap, inclusive answer. Since they’re often lo-fi to begin with, documentaries also suffer less on the smallest screen, and their shorter running times makes them perfect for online viewing.

Tonight at 8:30, NBC will premiere a new comedy, Parks and Recreation, which is ostensibly set in Indiana. This show comes from the people behind The Office, but where that show takes place in the real-life locale of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Parks and Recreation will occur in the fictional town of “Pawnee.”

Believe it or not, this might actually matter, and I try to explain why in an op-ed for my old college paper, The Shield.

(Hint: it has to do with Elkhart—and with my hope that the city will one day be known for more than being the birthplace of that modern-day Abraham, Shawn Kemp.)

Nobody knows if/when/how the Republicans will bring up Obama’s tenuous link to Bill Ayers, but that hasn’t stopped everybody from speculating. One thing getting overlooked, though, is The Weather Underground, an Oscar-nominated documentary on Ayers’s days as a ’60s radical. I reconsider the film, and what it might say about the Obama connection and the Obama campaign, in a new essay for Gelf Magazine .