Durham to Pynchon to Sontag

[Mark Kohut]

I share David’s cognitive dissonance  concern and hope.
Which led me to this speculation: If, maybe, Tom,  beyond writing the books, concerns himself with details of publication, thru his agent-wife, Ms. Jackson, as we seem to have learned, maybe that is the extent of his personal involvement with lawyer-possible things? Contract writing, etc. which Melanie would probably have done after discussion with Tom. 
So, if every famous-enough person needs a lawyer, maybe Melanie is the only real contact for Tom?   ( yes, she would discuss much/most with Tom, but not everything.) 

So, the lawyers found this—and to how they got a copy of the script, any well-known respected agent hears all kinds of culturally-related things—books, movies, music, etc—and could usually get a copy unless embargoed. (Read how a journalist got a copy of the rare, numbered, secret script for Heaven’s Gate from one of Norman Mailer’s assistants) 

And ran it by Melanie ( not Tom) or didn’t ,  acting on a general rule to kill all unauthorized uses. I once saw Disney lawyers at a department store in Pittsburgh cracking down on a local self-published kid’s book with BAMBI in it. 


Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 7, 2022, at 9:47 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> One can only hope that Pynchon didn’t personally know what his lawyer was
> doing, wasn’t knowingly such an asshole, because, as Shelton says,
> *“I thought*
> *Pynchon had a sense of humor.”*
> 
> This legal action represents the real defamation of Pynchon’s character,
> defamation of the funny cool person we think we know from reading his
> fiction.
> 
>> On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 9:25 PM Darah Kehnemuyi via Pynchon-l <
>> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Thanks Erik.   Pynchon passed over for Sontag ?              D.
>>    On Thursday, July 7, 2022 at 06:22:36 PM EDT, Erik T. Burns <
>> eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> from LitHub: Ron Shelton on Making Bull Durham, Getting Sued by Thomas
>> Pynchon, and Why Baseball is the Most Literary Sport ‹ Literary Hub
>> (lithub.com)
>> <
>> https://lithub.com/ron-shelton-on-making-bull-durham-getting-sued-by-thomas-pynchon-and-why-baseball-is-the-most-literary-sport/
>>> 
>> 
>> DM: So that’s your follow-up book. The Church of Basketball: I Have No Idea
>> What the Fuck I’m Doing. This is for a literary magazine, so I want to ask
>> about Crash Davis’ big monologue. His famous “I believe” speech. Am I
>> understanding right that you wrote that in one go, and nothing changed
>> except you switched the reference (the writer whose work Crash thinks is
>> overrated) from Thomas Pynchon to Susan Sontag? Can that be right?
>> 
>> RS: I typed that speech as fast as I could type. I thought it was bullshit,
>> but it would get people’s attention. I honestly didn’t even think it would
>> survive the editing. Kevin said it in one take. He wanted another and I
>> said “nope, we’re moving on.” It stayed in the movie and it turned out to
>> be the thing everyone talked about. But we can get into the change from
>> Pynchon to Sontag, if you really want to hear about it.
>> 
>> DM: I absolutely do.
>> 
>> Shelton: Well, my friends and I used to like to argue about Thomas Pynchon.
>> Some loved him, some hated him. Literary discussions over coffee or drinks
>> late at night. I thought, what if Annie Savoy loves Pynchon and Crash Davis
>> hates Pynchon, and they get into arguments about him? Then we see them each
>> re-reading Pynchon, and by the end we see them switch views on his work,
>> because they’re falling in love. I cut that out of the script. It was too
>> much, we didn’t need it. But the Pynchon reference was in the speech until
>> the day we were shooting it.
>> 
>> Then, we got a notification from a lawyer representing Pynchon threatening
>> us, saying we were defaming him. I was shocked, because (a) how did the
>> lawyer find the script? (b) we weren’t defaming him, it was going to turn
>> into an argument with the characters switching sides; and (c) I thought
>> Pynchon had a sense of humor, because he always had Professor Irwin Corey
>> accept his awards, which I felt was really cool.
>> 
>> But, rather than deal with lawyers, we started figuring out who we could
>> plug in there. Sontag had just written a not very good novel that I had
>> read. Somehow or another, she got put in there. And she wasn’t the right
>> person. She was primarily an essayist, so it came off as a cheap shot
>> against Sontag. It wasn’t intended to be. I always felt bad about that.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
> --
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