JD Salinger Film Will Solve Mystery

Catcher in the Rye author, JD Salinger, has long been a source of myth and mystery. But one of the big questions remaining about the reclusive author, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, is this: what’s taken Hollywood so long to get to the story of hiss life?

Whatever the reason, the silence has ended: with the upcoming release of an indie documentary called Salinger, the gates of privacy and silence are being lifted and it seems as though you can expect to be hearing a lot about Saligner from here on in, at least for a while. From The Guardian:

Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem and Armageddon.

But the promise of lifting the lid on the life of one of America's most revered writers has proven a massive lure to Hollywood. Salinger has been bought up by independent film mogul Harvey Weinstein after he reportedly saw a private screening of it at 7.30 on the morning of the Oscars. Even though the screening did not apparently include all of the film's most confidential revelations, he snapped it up immediately. 

In fact, so impressed have its backers been with what Salerno and his team have uncovered they are also releasing a TV show based on the documentary and have struck a deal with publisher Simon and Schuster to bring out a book called The Private War of JD Salinger.

Taking a page from his subject’s style, filmmaker Salerno is stoking the fires of public interest by not giving interviews and not giving air to rumors of previously unknown about affairs Salinger might have had and unpublished books he might have written. However, when the book was announced, , Salerno said that the “myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about JD Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being.”