My Movie Business Paperback by John Irving

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2000-10-10)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 192 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780676973211
• Item Weight: 225.38 grams
• Dimensions: 8.19 x 5.51 x 0.53 cm

In My Movie Business, John Irving tells of the thirteen years he spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen—for four different directors. He also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie; about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; and about his slow progress shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production. The memoir also gives an incisive history of abortion in the United States and a fascinating account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the author's grandfather, Dr. Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynecologist, who provided Irving with the medical background for The Cider House Rules.

Besides its qualities as a memoir—anecdotal, comic, affectionate and candid—My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.

About the Author

JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for In One Person. An international writer, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel, in every language. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto.