Entertainment
Pedro Almodóvar's first book, like his movies, blends reality and fiction: 'A fragmentary autobiography'
Fall Preview Books
The Last Dream
By Pedro Almodóvar, translated by Frank Wynne
HarperVia: 240 pages, $26
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When Pedro Almodóvar was a young boy, his mother would read and translate letters for their illiterate neighbors. One day, Almodóvar discovered that his mother was embellishing, even fabricating, what was in them.
With the irate purity of an 8-year-old, he confronted her and asked why she told one neighbor that the author of the letter had written movingly about her grandmother, a person not even mentioned in the communication.
“Did you see how happy she was?” his mother responded.
“That was a very good lesson for me even if I didn’t know it at that moment,” the Spanish filmmaker recalled in a recent video interview. Resplendent in a deep blue shirt, he was promoting his first book, a mix of short stories and personal essays called “The Last Dream.” The title piece is an essay about his mother that was written after her death.
“I soon realized reality needs fiction to make life easier and more livable,” he says, adding that it informed his stories and later his screenwriting. He always blended reality and fiction, telling personal stories without being beholden to a documentary-style reciting of the facts. (His mother also got Almodóvar a job teaching young men to read and write, which became a scene in “Pain and Glory.”)
Those stories have fueled a career that includes an original screenplay Oscar for “Talk to Her,” plus noms for his films “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “All About My Mother” and “Pain and Glory.” Along the way, Almodóvar, whose movies are renowned for their vibrant color palettes and dynamic soundtracks, became an icon in the LGBTQ+ community for capturing the love — and the complex nuances — of queer characters and helped make Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz into stars.
Almodóvar’s book — out Sept. 24 — came about accidentally. He has always been a storyteller and started writing as a teen. “But then, as I grew older, I started experimenting with Super 8 films and discovered I had more talent for expressing my stories with images. I was better at writing for the movies than as a fiction writer.”
But he always wrote, even if he stuck the short stories and essays in a drawer. “I wrote because I wanted to,” he says. “I didn’t think about the stories being published or made into movies; I just felt the necessity of writing it.”
Eventually, his assistant, Lola García, pulled out some of the old folders and suggested that Almodóvar consider publishing them. As he notes in the introduction, he has never written a memoir, allowed for an authorized biography or even formally kept a diary. But Almodóvar found, on reading the pieces he has collected, that they amount to “a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little cryptic.”
Of course, most of his films are so personal that they fill in many of those gaps. “My stories and movies are all mixed together in a kind of indivisible manner,” he says.
You might expect a director publishing his first book to stick to the writing but Almodóvar continually returns to the world of film in our conversation. He talks about having “always dreamed of writing a great novel” but finally accepting that he wouldn’t be able to while still hoping to at least write a “good and entertaining one,” then veers off into the difference between writing novels and scripts. He points to Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay for Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor,” starring Cruz, Michael Fassbender, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt.
“I love McCarthy’s novels, and they’re so full of dialogue so you immediately think they’d be a good script, but the rules for one are very different from the other, and it doesn’t mean the novelist can be a good screenwriter,” he says, then goes on to discuss Joseph and Herman Mankiewicz, Raymond Chandler and the ways writers do or do not adapt to Hollywood.
He also answers one question about his stories with a long explanation about how a car accident in “All About My Mother” is both an homage to John Cassavetes’ “Opening Night” and also deeply personal for him. “The movies I see, the things I read, they all become part of my own experience,” he says, “so there are many scenes in my movies that reference other movies.”
He also notes that the first story in his book, “The Visit,” later became the inspiration for his 2004 movie “Bad Education.” But it’s far from a straightforward adaptation. While the story opens with a classic Almodóvar flourish — a young woman flamboyantly dressed like Marlene Dietrich saunters through a small town before stopping at a Catholic school where she forces a showdown with the headmaster — and finishes with a dramatic plot twist, the film, with its multilayered meta examination of storytelling, is far more ambitious.
While “Bad Education” still condemns the church and the priests who sexually molested young boys and got away with it, that’s not the focal point. and the priests are even somewhat humanized.
“I wrote the story in the ’70s, and I can see my anger,” he says. “I was still furious in 2000, and I wanted to talk about the abuse but I was less interested in making an anticlerical movie than in talking about the origin of creativity and creation and how far people are willing to take a lie or a fiction. I was much more interested in sort of mixing all the different realities, including my own reality of being a filmmaker, as part of the story.”
Other stories, like “Too Many Gender Swaps,” aren’t directly connected to a specific movie, but he says they share thematic interests with his films. “You can see the origins of ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ and ‘All About My Mother’ in there,” he says.
Almodóvar notes that while he is very much still the same person who wrote all these stories across the decades, he is also very different. “Back then, I could spend the whole night in a disco, drinking and dancing and then in the morning go straight to work,” he says. “But there’s a moment [when] you have to choose between excitement and health. I decided to be healthy, to work more than party.”
While he gave up partying, his health has remained an issue — his spine and heart conditions are central to “Pain and Glory.” (He‘s had to have spinal fusion, which immobilized part of his spine.)
“Now, I just write and make movies,” he says. This year, he’ll release his first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. “My excitement now comes from my work. This means that I’m condemned to keep on making movies. The only thing now is whether they are good or not.”
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: A real-life ’70s hostage drama crackles in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.
In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. Kiritsis held a sawed-off shotgun to the back of Hall’s head and draped a wire around his neck that connected to the gun. If he moved too much, he would die.
The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis’ apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm.
But in “Dead Man’s Wire,” starring Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, these events are vividly brought to life by Van Sant. It’s been seven years since Van Sant directed, following 2018’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” and one of the prevailing takeaways of his new film is that that’s too long of a break for a filmmaker of Van Sant’s caliber.
Working from a script by Austin Kolodney, the filmmaker of “My Own Private Idaho” and “Good Will Hunting” turns “Dead Man’s Wire” into not a period-piece time capsule but a bracingly relevant drama of outrage and inequality. Tony feels aggrieved by his mortgage company over a land deal the bank, he claims, blocked. We’re never given many specifics, but at the same time, there’s little doubt in “Dead Man’s Wire” that Tony’s cause is just. His means might be desperate and abhorrent, but the movie is very definitely on his side.
That’s owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like “It,” “The Crow” and “Nosferatu,” here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very ’70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels “Dead Man’s Wire.”
Yet Van Sant’s film aspires to be a larger ensemble drama, which it only partially succeeds at. Tony’s plight is far from a solitary one, as numerous threads suggest in Kolodney’s fast-paced script. First and foremost is Colman Domingo as a local DJ named Fred Temple. (If ever there were an actor suited, with a smooth baritone, to play a ’70s radio DJ, it’s Domingo.) Tony, a fan, calls Fred to air his demands. But it’s not just a media outlet for him. Fred touts himself as “the voice of the people.”
Something similar could be said of Tony, who rapidly emerges as a kind of folk hero. As much as he tortures his hostage (a very good Dacre Montgomery), he’s kind to the police officers surrounding him. And as he and Dick spend more time together, Dick emerges as a kind of victim, himself. It’s his father’s bank, and when Tony gets M.L. Hall (Al Pacino) on the phone, he sounds painfully insensitive, sooner ready to sacrifice his son than acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Pacino’s presence in “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nod to “Dog Day Afternoon,” a movie that may be far better — but, then again, that’s true of most films in comparison to Sidney Lumet’s unsurpassed 1975 classic. Still, Van Sant’s film bears some of the same rage and disillusionment with the meatgrinder of capitalism as “Dog Day.”
There’s also a telling, if not entirely successful subplot of a local TV news reporter (Myha’la) struggling against stereotypes. Even when she gets the goods on the unspooling news story, the way her producer says to “chop it up” and put it on air makes it clear: Whatever Tony is rebelling against, it’s him, not his plight, that will be served up on a prime-time plate.
It doesn’t take recent similar cases of national fascination, such as Luigi Mangione, charged with killing a healthcare executive, to see contemporary echoes of Kiritsis’ tale. The real story is more complicated and less metaphor-ready, of course, than the movie, which detracts some from the film’s gritty sense of verisimilitude. Staying closer to the truth might have produced a more dynamic movie.
But “Dead Man’s Wire” still works. In the film, Tony’s demands are $5 million and an apology. It’s clear the latter means more to him than the money. The tragedy in “Dead Man’s Wire” is just how elusive “I’m sorry” can be.
“Dead Man’s Wire,” a Row K Entertainment release, is rated R for language throughout. Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.
In a bid for greater user engagement, Walt Disney Co. will introduce vertical videos to its Disney+ app over the next year, a company executive said Wednesday.
The move is part of the Burbank media and entertainment company’s effort to encourage more frequent app usage, particularly on smartphones.
“We know that mobile is an incredible opportunity to turn Disney+ into a true daily destination for fans,” Erin Teague, executive vice president of product management, said during an onstage presentation in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. “All of the short-form Disney content you want, all in one unified app.”
Teague said the company will evolve that capability over time to determine new formats, categories and content types.
Disney’s presentation also touched on its interest in artificial intelligence. Last month, San Francisco startup OpenAI said it had reached a licensing deal with Disney to use more than 200 of the company’s popular characters in its text-to-video tool, Sora. Under the terms of that deal, users will be able to write prompts that generate short videos featuring Disney characters and use ChatGPT images to create those characters’ visages. Some of those Sora-generated videos will be shown on Disney+, though the companies said the deal did not include talent likenesses or voices.
Disney also said it would invest $1 billion into the AI company.
Part of Disney’s move toward AI is to appeal to young Gen Alpha viewers, who are more comfortable with AI and “expect to interact with entertainment” instead of simply watching stories on the screen, Teague said.
“AI is an accelerator,” she said. “It’s why collaborations with partners like OpenAI are absolutely crucial. We want to empower a new generation of fandom that is more interactive and immersive, while also respecting human creativity and protecting user safety.”
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Is This Thing On?
Cinematic stories of disintegrating marriages are fairly commonplace—and often depressing emotional endurance tests, besides—so it’s interesting to see co-writer/director Bradley Cooper take this variation on the theme in a fresher direction. The unhappy couple in this place is Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), who decide matter-of-factly to separate. Then Alex impulsively decides to get up on stage at an open-mic comedy night, and starts turning their relationship issues into material. The premise would seem to suggest an uneven balance towards Alex’s perspective, but the script is just as interested in Tess—a former Olympic-level volleyball player who retired to focus on motherhood—searching for her own purpose. And the narrative takes a provocative twist when their individual sparks of renewed happiness lead them towards something resembling an affair with their own spouse. The screenplay faces a challenge common to movies about comedians in that Alex’s material, even once he’s supposed to be actively working on it, isn’t particularly good, and Cooper isn’t particularly restrained in his own supporting performance as the comic-relief buddy character (who is called “Balls,” if that provides any hints). Yet the two lead performances are terrific—particularly Dern, who nails complex facial expressions upon her first encounter with Alex’s act—as Cooper and company turn this narrative into an exploration of how it can seem that you’ve fallen out of love with your partner, when what you’ve really fallen out of love with is the rest of your life. Available Jan. 9 in theaters. (R)
JANUARY SPECIAL SCREENINGS
KRCL’s Music Meets Movies: Dig! XX @ Brewvies: As part of a farewell to Sundance, Brewvies/KRCL’s regular Music Meets Movies series presents the extended 20th anniversary edition of the 2004 Sundance documentary about the rivalry between the Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre as they chart different music-biz paths. The screening takes place at Brewvies (677 S. 200 West) on Jan. 8 @ 7:30 p.m., $10 at the door or 2-for-1 with KRCL shirt. brewvies.com
Trent Harris weekend @ SLFS: Utah’s own Trent Harris has charted a singular course as an independent filmmaker, and you can catch two of his most (in)famous works at Salt Lake Film Society. In 1991’s Rubin & Ed, two mismatched souls—one an eccentric, isolated young man (Crispin Glover), the other a middle-aged financial scammer—wind up on a comedic road trip through the Utah desert; 1995’s Plan 10 from Outer Space turns Mormon theology into a crazy science-fiction parody. Get a double dose of uncut Trent Harris weirdness on Friday, Jan. 9, with Rubin & Ed at 7 p.m. and Plan 10 from Outer Space at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13.75 for each screening. slfs.org
Rob Reiner retrospective @ Brewvies Sunday Brunch: Last month’s tragic passing of actor/director Rob Reiner reminded people of his extraordinary work, particularly his first handful of features. Brewvies’ regular “Sunday Brunch” series showcases three of these films this month with This Is Spinal Tap (Jan. 11), The Princess Bride (Jan. 18) and Stand By Me (Jan. 25). All screenings are free with no reservations, on a first-come first-served basis, at noon each day. brewvies.com
David Lynch retrospective @ SLFS: It’s been a year since the passing of groundbreaking artist David Lynch, and Salt Lake Film Society’s Broadway Centre Cinemas marks the occasion with some of his greatest filmed work. In addition to theatrical features Eraserhead (Jan. 11), Inland Empire (Jan. 11), Mulholland Dr. (Jan. 12), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Jan. 14), Blue Velvet (Jan. 19) and Lost Highway (Jan. 19), you can experience the entirety of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return on the big screen in two-episode blocs Jan. 16 – 18. The programming also includes the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. slfs.org
Death by Numbers @ Utah Film Center: Directed by Kim A. Snyder (the 2025 Sundance feature documentary The Librarians), this 2024 Oscar-nominated documentary short focuses on Sam Fuentes, survivor of a school shooting who attempts to process her experience through poetry. This special screening features a live Q&A with Terri Gilfillan and Nancy Farrar-Halden of Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, with Zoom participation by Sam Fuentes. The screening on Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 7 p.m. at Utah Film Center (375 W. 400 North) is free with registration at the website.
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