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How To Come Alive With Norman Mailer director Jeff Zimbalist: “I lament that in some ways the film is a nostalgia piece for that bygone era. But never saying that Mailer himself is a role model.”

In the second instalment with Jeff Zimbalist on How To Come Alive With Norman Mailer (co-written with Victoria Marquette and a highlight of the 14th edition of Doc NYC) we discuss a bygone era where opposite sides were coming together in debates, such as the infamous 1971 Town Hall event in New York City: A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation with Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Jacqueline Ceballos, where Mailer was taught a lesson or two (seen from Chris Hegedus and Da Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall documentary), and the Gore Vidal Norman Mailer showdown on The Dick Cavett Show.

Jeff Zimbalist on Norman Mailer: “He’s incredibly prophetic.

Town Bloody Hall

Blu ray

Criterion

1979 / 85 min.

Starring Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston

Cinematography by D.A. Pennebaker

Directed by D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus

No matter the subject, Norman Mailer was the star of whatever he produced—in Advertisements for Myself, a mix of self-criticism and self-congratulation—he could have been talking to himself. He took to using the third person in The Armies of the Night. He sometimes adopted a new name—in Of a Fire on the Moon he was “Aquarius.” He directed and acted in a handful of independently made films and plastered his mug on campaign posters that papered New York when he ran for mayor in 1969. His career was one big selfie. But what an ambitious self portrait it was—Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos—he tried to top them all.

He worked hard to be a new kind of empathetic writer, sinking into the psyche of all creatures bright,...