"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That' all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy." —Holden Caulfield
1919 - 2010
WHERE'S THE MOVIE?
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger features fictional narrator Holden Caulfield, a 17 year-old expelled from prep school for failing grades. Adrift in New York city, Holden essentially a nerd sneers and smirks at the limited world around him with unbridled malcontent. Salinger, writing for adults, convincingly captures speech, gestures and pathos found among the generation of teenagers during the 1950s, employing many tropes and trappings of literary acrobatics often repeated during the decade that would follow.
July 16th marked the anniversary for the 1951 publication with a quarter million copies of the book sold each year.
The Holy Grail for adolescent defiance (the literary elite list the book among the top 100 English-language novels) the writing stands as the vanguard for profanity and portrayal of sexuality in conveying teenage angst and rebellion...and one boy's uneasy desire not to grow up.
Jerome David Salinger (born 1919 on New Years Day) still writes fiction but feels that publishing it would invade his privacy. Oddly, since the 1950s, he has isolated himself in rural New Hampshire with a small literary output. Famously living the life of a recluse for a half-century, Salinger has never authorized adaptations of any of his work with one early exception. The author had become so incensed by producer Sam Goldwyn's treatment of his story "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut" that he since steadfastly refused to sell movie rights to any of his stories. So passionate about this that Salinger has stipulated in his will to block Hollywood from adapting any of his works following his death. On January 28, 2010 he died of natural causes.
J.D. Salinger early in his writing career expressed a willingness to allow his stories to serve as the basis for feature filmwork. But the 1949 critically panned adaptation of "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut (released under a different title) took creative liberties with the author's plot. The subsequent publication of The Catcher in the Rye resulted in repeated attempts to secure the novel's screen rights. During this time, in a letter, Salinger suggested mounting a play in which he would portray Holden Caulfield; and, if he couldn’t play the part, “forget about it."
No doubt this was the author's sardonic endeavor to discourage all interest in the performance rights to the novel, but Hollywood is not one to take a hint. Writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive attempts to snare the screen s rights: "Of course I read The Catcher in the Rye.... Wonderful book. I loved it. I pursued it. I wanted to make a picture out of it. And then one day a young man came to the office of Leland Hayward, my agent, in New York, and said, 'Please tell Mr. Leland Hayward to lay off. He’s very, very insensitive.' And he walked out. That was the entire speech. I never saw him. That was J. D. Salinger and that was Catcher in the Rye."
In 1961, J. D. Salinger denied Elia Kazan permission for a stage adaptation of Catcher for Broadway. And for years actor-director Jerry Lewis (well in his thirties) tried hard to get his hands on the film rights in order to play Holden.
It would seem that everyone from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have bid in vain to secure the role. A more sober and resigned John Cusack stated his regret about turning twenty-one meant that he would be too old to play the part.
The one "exception" occurred somewhat after the fact when in 2003 a BBC television program featured intercutting discussions of the novel with "a series of short films that featured an actor playing J. D. Salinger's adolescent antihero, Holden Caulfield." The show defended its unlicensed use of the author's material under a claim of "literary review" with no (major) charge of copyright infringement filed.
Despite some speculation about director Terrence Malick being linked to a possible screen adaptation of the novel, Salinger's agent has received offers for Catcher's movie rights from producer Harvey Weinstein along with countless others...
...including Steven Spielberg, so resolute J.D. Salinger remains in his enmity toward Hollywood in general and film production in particular. Salinger's agent, in fact, turned down the overture by Spielberg without even presenting the proposal to the author for consideration. In the book the protagonist, Holden Caulfield spews anti-Hollywood screed, oozing from that 1949 wound that refused to heal, an unfettered anathema about the film community's enduring phoniness.
An irreconcilable author's stubbornness notwithstanding, giving the book a simple read nowadays, the question arises: Where's the movie?
Long story short, The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 "take-off " on the novel Ulysses by James Joyce published in its entirety some 30 years before; Joyce's narrative telling the story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he travels the streets of Dublin. The title of Joyce's novel and its narrative alludes to a hero of The Illiad and The Odyssey, the epic poem attributed to Homer and relating the journey home of the Greek warrior Odysseus in the aftermath of the Trojan War.
Salinger's teenage mythical hero, Holden Caulfield gives a near-schizophrenic account of wandering the streets of Manhattan over a two-day period following his expulsion from a college preparatory school in Pennsylvania, the juvenile's journey by train to New York City, his stay at a derelict hotel, a clumsy encounter with a prostitute and his refusal to have sex with her. (There's a run-in with the pimp.) Holden spends two lonely, drunken days in the Big Apple, nervous about the change in his life that comes with growing up and stemming from the death of his brother, Allie.
At some point, Salinger's hero steals time with his sister, Phoebe, sharing with her a small fantasy based upon Holden misreading a poem by Robert Burns:
"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. thousand of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That' all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
Later, in the wee hours of the night, Holden drops by the home of his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini where he's offered a place to sleep—and some advice. Over the course of their interlocutory, Antolini indulges a number of cocktails; some time later Holden is awaken by this man patting his head in a way suggestive of a pederast.
The last day of his urban sojourn is spent meandering the avenues before taking his sister to the Central Park Zoo, where he watches her with abject joy riding the carousel.
Forgoing plans to move out West to Hollywood because of all the phoniness out there, toward the end of the story Holden plans to enroll in the fall with a different school. However, finding the moment inconsequential, our protagonist warns all those reading that they could experience the same miserable odyssey in their lives.
In December 1980 "The Catcher in the Rye" was benighted by the tragic death of John Lennon when Mark David Chapman, a crazed fan killed the former Beatles member then later citing Salinger's novel as inspiration, saying in part "this extraordinary book holds many answers."
The genius of the book is in its immersing writing style, given the candid immediacy of diary entries, written as though Holden is almost (but not quite) schizophrenic in going about the streets talking aloud in colloquial speak on disjointed ideas and loose episodes in his life.
"There's no more to Holden Caulfield," said J.D. Salinger in 1980 as part of a written statement. "Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time." An eccentric famous for his intolerance, whose contempt appears pretentious has served notice time and again that film rights to his novel have been put on terminal hold. Read the book and you'll see that Salinger is right. The narrative is uneventful, hopelessly dated and cinematically jejune. Today, a movie adaptation couldn't help but radically alter the story's intent.
J.D. Salinger long ago answered the question raised here. There is no movie. Holden Caulfield (like this photo of the author) is only a frozen moment in time.
Frederick Louis Richardson
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