Joe Gould's Secret (film)
| Joe Gould's Secret | |
|---|---|
DVD cover
|
|
| Directed by | Stanley Tucci |
| Produced by | Elizabeth Alexander Stanley Tucci Charles Weinstock |
| Written by |
Howard A. Rodman Based on books by Joseph Mitchell |
| Starring | Stanley Tucci Ian Holm Patricia Clarkson Hope Davis Susan Sarandon |
| Narrated by | Stanley Tucci |
| Music by | Evan Lurie |
| Cinematography | Maryse Alberti |
| Edited by | Suzy Elmiger |
|
Production
company |
|
| Distributed by | USA Films |
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
104 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $468,684 |
Joe Gould's Secret is a 2000 American drama film directed by Stanley Tucci. The screenplay by Howard A. Rodman is based on the magazine article Professor Sea Gull and the book Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell.
Set in Manhattan in the early 1940s, the film focuses on the relationship between Joseph Mitchell, a writer for The New Yorker, and Joe Gould, an aging, bearded, disheveled bohemian and Harvard University graduate who wanders through the streets of Greenwich Village carrying a tattered portfolio and demanding donations to "The Joe Gould Fund". At times Gould is calmly sweet and perceptive, at others he's a pathological liar and an obnoxious drunk, and he frequently experiences sudden outbursts of rage. Earning occasional financial support from poet E. E. Cummings, portrait painter Alice Neel, Village Vanguard founder Max Gordon, and art gallery owner Vivian Marquie, among others, Gould is able to secure a nightly room in flophouses until an anonymous benefactor arranges accommodations in a residential hotel for him.
Gould allegedly is collecting the observations of average citizens to incorporate into his oral history of the world, fragments of which he has given to various people for safekeeping. Mitchell meets him in a coffee shop and initially is fascinated by the colorful character. However, with the passage of time, as Gould becomes irritatingly intrusive and demanding, disrupting the ordinary life Mitchell shares with his photographer wife and their two daughters, the journalist begins to question if the elderly man's 9 million-word opus actually exists or is merely a figment of his imagination.
...
Wikipedia