IP Picks🔎: Alien Abductions and CIA Assassinations
âž• a charming heist caper from Cedric the Entertainer, and the life story of a trailblazing transgender activist
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
This week brought the passing of several giants: editor Robert Gottlieb, author Cormac McCarthy and comic artist John Romita. If you missed them, I wanted to flag their obituaries. Each lived interesting and consequential lives that influenced Hollywood.
If not the best American novelist of his generation, McCarthy, of course, was belonged on a short list of three or four for that honor. His beautiful yet brutal books — often set in the Southwest — became the basis for six movies, including The Road, All the Pretty Horses and the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men.
There are many great McCarthy stories, but I particularly like the one he shared with Oprah in 2007 about how creative inspiration struck him when he was on vacation in El Paso with his son, and then reappeared years later, resulting in Pulitzer Prize winner The Road: "One night, John was asleep — it was night, it was probably about two or three o'clock in the morning — and I went over and I just stood and looked out the window at this town. I could hear the trains going through and that very lonesome sound. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste and I thought a lot about my little boy. And so I wrote those pages and that was the end of it. And then about four years later I was in Ireland and I woke up one morning and I realized it wasn't two pages in another book — it was a book. And it was about that man and that little boy."
Gottlieb, who was 92, was an editor at Simon & Schuster, Knopf and the New Yorker for decades. The list of authors he edited reads like a who's who of 20th-century greats, and he demonstrated an impressive eye for both pop and high-brow, fiction and non-fiction: John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Barbara Tuchman and Bill Clinton. Perhaps his most famous and long-standing relationship was with writer Robert Caro, which spanned some 50 years and was the subject of Turn the Page, a great 2022 documentary. (Totally worth a watch if you've never seen it.)
Unless you're a comic geek, the name John Romita, who was 93 at the time of his passing, might not be immediately familiar to you but you've surely seen his art, like this iconic image, to which director Sam Raimi paid homage in Spider-Man 2.
Sandwiched between the fluid work of creator Steve Ditko in the ’60s and the flashy style of Todd McFarlane in the ’90s, Romita's unfussy art didn't always get the acclaim it deserves, but for those whose first exposure to Spider-Man came in the ‘70s and ‘80s (and that includes a very high percentage of the people who helped adapt him for the screen), Romita’s art defined the idea of Spider-Man. And it wasn't just Spider-Man; Romita became Marvel's art director in 1973, a position he held for about two decades, and in that role helped shape the look of such iconic characters as Punisher, Luke Cage and Wolverine. There's no doubt that after the initial burst of creativity by Ditko, Jack Kirby and others in the early 1960s that created the Marvel Comics universe, Romita was perhaps its most influential artist.
On to this week’s picks, which run the gamut from alien abductions to a period heist comedy. The full rundown:
A historical drama about the first Americans to claim that they were abducted by aliens, and how that transformed them into wacky conspiracy theorists.
A period heist comedy about a small-town hustler plotting to rob a train to save his family’s finances.
A real-life spy drama about the CIA’s role in the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
A potential biopic about the first American to undergo gender-reassignment surgery.
A true-crime comedy about a psychic grifter who conned a sheikh out of $90 million.
