Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Quotes from across the spectrum reflecting why Gary Cooper & Ernest Hemingway still resonate today | Cooper & Hemingway: The True Gen

COOPER AND HEMINGWAY: THE TRUE GEN
A feature documentary | A New York Times Critics Pic
www.cooperhemingway.com
Narrated by Sam Waterston
Voice of Hemingway by Len Cariou
Written and Directed by John Mulholland
Produced by Richard Zampella & Shannon Mulholland

Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen is a feature documentary on the 20 year friendship of writer Ernest Hemingway and actor Gary Cooper who died only seven weeks apart in 1961.

Quotes reflecting why Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway resonate today:

“Among my biggest literary influences would be For Whom The Bell Tolls. Robert Jordan is an inspiration to me.”
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

“High Noon is my favorite movie. Any time you’re alone and feel you’re not getting the support you need, Gary Cooper’s Will Kane becomes the perfect metaphor.”        
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON


Richard Zampella Cooper and Hemingway
Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway
Sun Valley
“Ernest Hemingway influenced more writers in the 20th Century than any other writer. By far.”
ELMORE LEONARD, author

“Gary Cooper was the perfect image for our campaign to get people to vote. We’d never had free elections in Poland. I am always so touched when people ask me to autograph that image of Gary Cooper from our campaign poster.”                                                                                                                                            
LECH WALESA, President of Poland, Nobel Peace Prize

"Even someone like me, who didn't operate consciously under Hemingway's shadow, was still touched by Hemingway's shadow. He had an enormous influence on male writing in America, and his echoes … are to be found almost everywhere.”
JUNOT DIAZ, author
                                                                                                                                                                
"I had dreams - fantasies really - about acting. I watched Gary Cooper as a boy. That's who I wanted to be, Gary Cooper.”            
DJIMON HOUSOU, actor, from Benin, West Africa

“Robert Jordan was everything I ever wanted to be. I was thrilled by him.  I knew that Robert Jordan, if he were in the next cell to mine, he would be stoic, he would be strong, he would be tough, he wouldn't give up. And Robert Jordan would expect me to do the same thing.”
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN
 
“I love Gary Cooper. High Noon is my favorite film.”
JUNICHIRO KOIZUMA, PRIME MINISTER, JAPAN

"At times I couldn't help feeling like The Old Man and the Sea," Against tremendous odds, I had caught a big fish, but on the long voyage back to shore, the prized catch had been picked to pieces by sharks,"     PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

"In only one scene in the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, WINGS, we see the future of screen acting in the form of Gary Cooper. He is quiet and natural, somehow different from the other cast members. He does something mysterious with his eyes and shoulders that is much more like 'being' than 'acting'. "                                                                                                                                                
TOM HANKS, actor

Richard Zampella Cooper and Hemingway
Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway

“Stoicism, grace under pressure, the 20th century heroism. Hemingway created the whole idea of the anti-fascist hero. I mean you can't really have Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart and all those characters without the Hemingway character. They all kind of derive from Robert Jordan.”
ROBERT STONE, author

“I don't particularly like westerns as a genre, but I do love certain westerns. ''High Noon'' means a lot to me - I love the purity and the honesty, I love Gary Cooper in that film.”
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, actor
 
“Several people, familiar with my own work, find it surprising that I should be a Hemingway enthusiast. Hemingway’s achievement … was to get his effects by making the reader do the work. … if one tries to write like Hemingway without understanding that, one ends up with merely a Hemingway gloss. It is not simply physical action but the action of the physical world upon the individual that is important in Hemingway’s work and in his thought, too,”
TOM STOPPARD,  playwright

“Gary Cooper was … a phenomenon – his ability to take something and elevate it, give it such a dignity … Cooper was such a presence.”
AL PACINO, actor

Hemingway. Those sentences just knock me out. The thing about Hemingway sentences is that they are really loaded. Every comma and absence of a comma makes a huge difference, and it's really been deliberated.”
JOAN DIDION, author
“Just play it like Gary Cooper.”
PHILLIP KAUFMAN, directing Sam Shepard in THE RIGHT STUFF

“That Ernest Hemingway is able to convince me that Santiago’s battle is not in vain; that there are other powers in the world besides fear and greed; that every form of life has its own dignity and beauty, is his strength and importance as a writer. For one does not need to be a tuna fisherman to appreciate the true glory of this little masterpiece.”                                                                                                                                  NANCY SPAIN, journalist

“Cooper put his whole career on the block in the face of the McCarthyite witch-hunters who were terrorizing Hollywood. He was subjected to a violent underground pressure campaign by John Wayne and others aimed at getting him to leave the film, and he was told that unless he agreed to do so, he, too, would be blacklisted in Hollywood for the rest of his life. But Cooper believed in me. He saw it through. He was the only big one who tried. The only one.”
CARL FOREMAN, screenwriter, director, producer

“If a man has a conscience … he might think about air power some time.”                                                            
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (from 1950), and as current as drone warfare in 2014.

“Where are you, Gary Cooper, now that we need you?”
NEW YORK MAGAZINE           

Richard Zampella Cooper and Hemingway
Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway

Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen
www.cooperhemingway.com | Twitter: @coophem
Narrated by Sam Waterston
Voice of Hemingway by Len Cariou
Written and Directed by John Mulholland
Produced by Richard Zampella & Shannon Mulholland

www.twitter.com/transmultimedia
www.trans-multimedia.com
www.richardzampella.com
 


Wednesday, February 11, 2015

"Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen" Showing tonight 7/11 at 7PM the Lyric Theater

Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen Screening and Discussion
with Writer/Director John Mulholland & Producer Richard Zampella
http://www.thelyric.com/events/?ID=1470



EVENT INFORMATION
Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen - (M)
On paper, the friendship between these two celebrated American icons would seem to have been impossible. But Coop and "papa" became the best of friends, right up until their deaths several weeks apart in 1961. Today, 50 years after their deaths, the intriguing and at times contentious friends which roamed from Idaho and New York to Cuba and Paris--resonates on fascinating and diverse levels. And as the extraordinary popularity of "Saving Private Ryan" proved, Americans are fond of looking back to another time to understand what real heroism is, to come to grips with what courage means. Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper dealt with this very subject as no one had before, since Hemingway's fiction and Cooper's persona were not about masculinity as a one-note, smash-mouth force of nature; rather, it was about the self-respect that comes from comporting oneself with courage in impossible circumstances. In many ways it was the perfect match: Ernest Hemingway whose heroes personified his definition of courage--"grace under pressure"--and Gary Cooper, the man who often portrayed those characters on screen. Yet in other ways--politically, intellectually, and personally--Hemingway and Cooper were a study in contradictions.

The story of this extraordinary 20+ year friendship is the focus of this feature documentary. The film, narrated by Sam Waterson, features interviews with such Hollywood luminaries as Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, George Plimpton, and Patricia Neal.