How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer

A good biography of the most interesting American writer of the 20th century. His thoughts on how to come alive are bracing and powerful and we get a full dose of them. What the film lacks is an adequate complement of readings from his work. This is a large gap, a poor decision by the filmmakers. We get some sense of his writing style but not nearly enough. Granted, prose readings can be problematic in terms of filmmaking. So the thing to do is hire a good actor to sit on a bare stage with decent lighting and have him read short excerpts--three or four sentences from at least half the author's works, to give the rich flavor of the prose, which is as sustaining as perfect chowder served in Provincetown. As the actor reads, the sentences can be projected on a screen that's also on the stage. Highly visual. Mailer's words are worth the effort.

If you're new to Mailer (does anyone under 30 have any familiarity with him?) you might want to start your education by watching the film "When We Were Kings" about the Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman fight in 1974 (Mailer is a talking head in the film, very effective) and then reading Mailer's short book about the encounter, "The Fight" (1975), one of his best works.