SALINGER Documentary Met With Positive Reactions At Telluride Film Festival

J.D. Salinger, left, after the Normandy invasion with his fellow counterintelligence officers. The group called itself ‘The Four Musketeers.’ Photo Courtesy of the Weinstein Company

The SALINGER documentary made it’s world premiere today at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and was met with positive responses by the critics in attendance. Filmmaker Ken Burns called the film “extraordinary” during the q&a following the screening.

For more than fifty years, J.D. Salinger, the elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by lack of access and the recycling of inaccurate information. Thus, Salinger has largely remained an enigma to the public and media alike.

During the nine years in which SALINGER was in production – including the six years while the project was being shot under wraps – filmmaker Shane Salerno interviewed hundreds of people the world over, many of whom had previously declined to go on the record about their relationship with the iconic author.

Reactions via Twitter after the Telluride showing.

Anne Thompson (Thompson on Hollywood)

The most exciting reveal in Salinger doc is the list of books to be published between 2015 and 2020. Including Glass & Caulfield chronicles.

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) September 2, 2013

Review: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/telluride-review-salinger-surprise-preview-and-q-a

Sasha Stone (Awards Daily)

Salinger is an incredibly beautifully made doc about a man with clear and permanent damage from WWII. Deep. Sad. A must see. — Sasha Stone (@AwardsDaily) September 2, 2013

Review: http://www.awardsdaily.com/blog/telluride-review-salinger/

Tomris Laffly (Popcorn Business)

Salinger: will be open to snark, and will be perceived as exploitative. One thing you can’t argue- it is meticulously made. #TFF40

— Tomris Laffly (@TomiLaffly) September 2, 2013

Salerno’s much speculated-upon documentary, which has made front page news since 2010, offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were unknown even to his own family. Providing unparalleled access to never-before-published photographs, diaries, letters, legal records, and documents, the highly anticipated SALINGER paints a definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.

Particularly illuminating the last fifty-six years of the writer’s life—a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers— Salerno has, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall.

Salinger during the liberation of Paris in 1944. Photo Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

SALINGER features interviews with 150 subjects including Salinger’s friends and colleagues who have never spoken on the record before as well as film footage, photographs and other material that has never been seen. Additionally, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, John Guare, Martin Sheen, David Milch, Robert Towne, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal and Pulitzer Prize winners A. Scott Berg and Elizabeth Frank talk about Salinger’s influence on their lives, their work and the broader culture.

The film will be in select theaters September 6th.

Visit www.salingerfilm.com to discover WHAT HAPPENED TO J.D. SALINGER.

https://twitter.com/SecretSalinger