New Yorker. Summer Movies.

"Summer Movies," the centerpiece of the New Yorker's "Summer Fiction" issue, features seven literary A-listers and shooting stars reliving not, thank heavens, the Summer of '07 but, instead, summers long gone.

"Did every one of us know how to do Ralph Macchio's victory kick at the end of The Karate Kid?" asks Dave Eggers. "This goes without saying. After seeing Breaking Away, did we, while riding at top speed, stick bicycle pumps into each other's spokes to see if this would indeed cause a horrific wipeout? Yes, and it did."

Marisa Silver recalls the first day on the set of her first film, Old Enough: "I realized that the minute I said the word, things would hurtle forward - the film, my life. They waited. I said it. Action."

Gary Shteyngart: "At the movie theatre, my father and I were essentially two immigrant men - one smaller than the other and not yet swaddled in a thick carpet of body hair - sitting before the canned spectacle of our new homeland, silent, attentive, enthralled."

"Summer movies aren't classics and don't always make money, but they make friends," writes Roger Angell. "Some of them are counter-classics, like Remember the Night, the 1940 Barbara Stanwyck-Fred MacMurray thing that isn't Double Indemnity." And then there's Quest for Fire...

Jeffrey Eugenides on Walkabout: "As we went to our car, my mother and I made appreciative noises about the film in order to disguise the awkwardness of having seen it together."

"My friend's mother wore a batik skirt that flowed softly from her hips like light through a lampshade. She was lovely and sophisticated, and I was infatuated," recalls Charles D'Ambrosio. They're walking to the theater to see... Summer of '42.

Miranda July looks back on the hot summer she made her first movie: "I recorded my soundtrack by playing the Thunderball album while the camera was rolling. I chose track six from side two, 'Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.' I've never seen Thunderball, so in my mind this wonderful music by John Barry can be paired only with my portrayal of a mother doing an inappropriately sultry dance for her pre-pubescent daughter."

Elsewhere in this issue of the New Yorker: David Denby reviews Mr Brooks, Crazy Love and Ocean's Thirteen.

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2007 11:44 AM