CLIP FILM GENIUS DIRECTOR: Michael Grandage PRODUCED IN: USA 2016 CAST: Colin Firth (the publisher Maxwell Perkins) Jude Law (the writer Thomas Wolfe) Nicole Kidman (Wolfe s lover) SYNOPSIS New York, 1929. Maxwell Perkins, a successful editor at Scribner s Sons, already known for discovering literary giants such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, lives in a cottage just outside the city with his wife and five daughters. One day, in his office, he finds himself reading the manuscript of O Lost, a novel by an unknown writer, Thomas Wolfe. Impressed by its content, he decides to publish it, thus beginning a challenging collaboration with the author. The novel is published and is a huge success, selling fifteen thousand copies in a single month. Thomas s relationship with Aline Bernstein, a married woman twenty years his senior, gets more complicated after the book s release. Max manages to get Wolfe s second novel, Of Time and the River, published after an exhausting, years-long editing process. This second novel, too, is a success. Upon returning to New York from Paris, Wolfe immediately begins work on a new book. However, his turbulent nature leads to an animated quarrel with Max, weakening their relationship. Aline finally leaves Thomas, considering him too self-centred and incapable of caring for others. Later, Max receives a phone call from Wolfe s mother: Thomas had been diagnosed with cerebral tuberculosis. Despite surgery, Thomas shows no signs of recovery. He dies shortly after, but not before writing and leaving a letter to his friend Max, reaffirming his immense affection. BEFORE WATCHING 6 Read Thomas Wolfe s biography, then answer the questions. Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900, a prolific American novelist originally from Asheville, North Carolina; he grew up in his mother s boardinghouse, a setting that became central to his fiction. He is best known for his autobiographical and wide-ranging novels. A brilliant student, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 15. He wrote plays for the Carolina Playmakers and worked as an editor of the university newspaper. He then attended Harvard University to study playwriting under George Pierce Baker. He initially aspired to be a playwright but found success in fiction after 302 PeoPle and instruments moving to New York. With the help of his editor Maxwell Perkins, he published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929. The novel was a semifictionalised account of his life and was so realistic that it was banned from his hometown library, forcing him to avoid Asheville for eight years. He continued to write prolifically, producing more novels before his death, among which Of Time and the River (1935) and The Web and the Rock (1939), published posthumously. Wolfe died young in 1938 of tubercular meningitis, but his unfinished manuscripts were edited and transformed into posthumous novels.