Due to be released in the US this September, Shane Salerno’s upcoming documentary, Salinger, is pretty much guaranteed to be one of the biggest contenders in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars early next year.
With a little under three more months to go before The Weinstein Company releases it across the Atlantic, the first trailer has been released over on Yahoo Movies, giving us a terrific first look into Salerno’s long-awaited documentary.
SALINGER features interviews with 150 subjects including Salinger’s friends, colleagues and members of his inner circle who have never spoken on the record before as well as film footage, photographs and other material that has never been seen. Additionally, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, John Guare, Martin Sheen, David Milch, Robert Towne, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal and Pulitzer Prize winners A. Scott Berg and Elizabeth Frank talk about Salinger’s influence on their lives, their work and the broader culture. The film is the first work to get beyond the Catcher in the Rye author’s meticulously built up wall: his childhood, painstaking work methods, marriages, private world and the secrets he left behind after his death in 2010.
Delving into the life about the reclusive author of the seminal The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, Salerno’s movie features interviews with over a hundred people, including the author’s friends, colleagues, and a slew of famous faces like Edward Norton, Danny DeVito, John Cusack, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Martin Sheen, and many more.
Salerno’s long-in-development project involved not just this upcoming documentary, but also a 700-page biography that he co-wrote with David Shields, which Simon & Schuster acquired in a seven-figure deal, making it one of the most anticipated multi-faceted projects in recent memory.
Whilst I have a lot of love for Salinger’s best-known work, The Catcher in the Rye, it is his short stories that have really had a big impact on me. If you haven’t read any of his work, I can’t recommend enough how much you should seek it out at the closest possible opportunity. He really was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
Salinger is set to be released in the US on September 6th, giving it a prime position on the Oscars slate. No word yet on a UK release date, but we’ll hopefully be seeing it in our cinemas before the year’s end, too.
