Sunday 13 June 2010

Dark Blood


River Phoenix was eleven days away from completing production on ‘Dark Blood’ when he died on October 31st 1993.
He was playing the role of ‘Boy’, a young widower who lived as a hermit on a nuclear testing site and made dolls that he believed had magical powers as he waited for the end of the world.
Phoenix’s death at such an advanced stage of the films development meant that the project had to be abandoned.
The producers of the film, having discovered that the cause of death was drug-related, attempted sue Phoenix’s mother for $6 million, arguing that by not declaring his drug use he was in breach of his contract with them and had jeopardised the completion of the film.
The case later collapsed...

Saturday 5 June 2010

The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls


‘The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls’ is a short story by J.D. Salinger which was completed in 1945 and sold to the ‘Women’s Home Companion’, a monthly magazine, in 1947.
Apparently the publisher felt the story was ‘downbeat’ and refused to publish it in the ‘Women’s Home Companion’ in 1947 and in ‘Collier’s Weekly’ in 1951.
Around this time Salinger bought the story back and it has never been published.
The story is about the death of Kenneth Caulfield who would appear as Allie in Salinger’s most famous work ‘The Catcher in the Rye’.
Today the only place that the story can be read is in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. The manuscript is one of a number of Salinger’s works that the University holds but access to the stories are tightly controlled according to Salinger’s very specific instructions.
Visitors must present two forms of identification and are then supervised as they read the story behind the closed doors of a particular reading room.
Salinger also ordered that the story could not be published until 50 years after he died.
J.D. Salinger died on January 27th 2010.
That gives us an earliest publication date of January 27th 2060...