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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 6, 2007)
I • 36 lust OUt JULY b. ¿007 out ______ out out out out Winning Isn't Everything If DAD’S World Cuisine and Supper Club Renowned Entertainer Jim Chan as your host (once voted Best Host in the city by Willamette Week) ________ r*iL must have a thing for award-winning ■■ authors. I’ve been living with Oregon Book ■p NEW OWNERSHIP. NEWLY RENOVATED, NEWLY EXPANDED MENU Breakfast«Luneh Brunch Fuilwbar Hlop’dy^m a r y s ho us Dance to live Cabaret-Style Performances Friday and Saturday Nights 6:30 to 9:30pm Award winner Marc Acito for 21 years, but that didn’t stop me from shamelessly flirting with Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize i n fusedïvo'd k a s winning novelist (The Hours) and screenwriter mimosas (A Home at the End of the World). Cunningham and I were together recently in BREAKFAST BUFFET AH you can eat New York for a screening of his new film, Evening, Saturday and Sunday 8:30am til 3pm $6.95 ’6.95 LUNCH BUFFET Monday-Friday But it certainly gets my attention based on the novel by O. Henry prize-winning »7.95 DINNER BUFFET Monday-Thursday author Susan Minot (with whom I haven’t flirted • www.dadsdining.« < >m yer). Cunningham has masterfully simplified Minot’s 8608 N Lombard in Historic St. Johns narrative (there are 50 characters in it) while writing vivid scenes for Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave and Glenn Close to sink their teeth into. After viewing the film, 1 sat down with COME DINE AL FRESCO a metaphor for the creative act...the fundamental human desire to create something perfect. Cunningham to talk about the movie and his novels. FS: In a similar vein, what’s with all the ménages à trois? Were you involved with one Nostrana Floyd Sklaver: First off, what’s with the bak when you were younger? MC: Oh, when I was younger in many, but rarely ing metaphors? Michael Cunningham: It’s true that I’ve writ ten two novels with prominent cakes in them. for more than a night. 1 just think that as you start up from one, three is the first interesting number. One is just one; two.. .can only be symmetrical. Three gets FS: Three. interesting. Three can be perfectly balanced; three MC: What was the third? can be off-balance. Three feels dramatically interest ing to me in a way that two does not. FS: The Hours, A Home at the End of the Restaurant of the "Year 2006 — ®hc (Oregonian World and Flesh and Blood. MC: There’s not really a prominent cake in FS: Which character in your books is most like you? A Home at the End of the World. MC: While Virginia Woolf [in The Hours] felt g most autobiographical, if we’re just talking in i ■ terms of the characters’ whose lives are most outwardly like mine, they would be the white gay guys who struggle to come to terms with their sexuality and who fall in love very easi ly with the wrong and the right people. FS: You’ve said that a writer shouldn’t adapt his own work for the screen, but what was it like to adapt someone else’s words? MC: It was difficult but 1 guess a more inter esting and invigorating challenge than adapt ing your own stuff—to take a story that’s already been written and try to keep it true to itself and also make it your own. FS: Is that why you made Buddy gay [in Floyd flirts with Michael Cunningham in New York. Evening]? MC: I made Buddy, let’s say, sexually FS: Excuse me. Sissy Spacek is teaching Colin Farrell how to bake throughout. ambiguous; Buddy is sort of pre-gay. What he is at that point in his life is sort of in love with everybody. MC: Well, it’s a pie. You know, you don’t start writing with these thoughts in mind; they just emerge as the book starts to accumulate. I’ve • Try our N1:W BREAKEAST MENU • $ 1 .OO Mimosa or Bloody Mary with breakfast purchase - Patio Seating Open always had a certain thing about women’s lives. I mean, duh, it comes from my mother. FS: How gorgeous is Hugh Dancy [who plays Buddy in Evening]? MC: My lord. He’s such a movie star. Isn’t he fantastic? If he doesn’t become a major movie star, there’s no justice in the world. FS: How so? MC: My mother was incredibly driven and FS: So I’m out of questions, but I just want a huge perfectionist. Everything had to be perfect, to sit here and look at you because you’re so perfect, perfect, which drove her and all of us kind beautiful. of crazy. MC: OK, we can do that, just stare at each oth er for a while. FS: Like the mom in Flesh and Blood? MC: Very much like the mother in Flesh and Blood. And I guess when 1 grew up and started to And that’s where our interview ended—just before 1 became too Out Going. write about all kinds of people, among them 633 SE Powell Blvd Portland j 503.230.BENT women who are trapped in lives that are a little too small for them, cooking has always seemed like S klaver wants to know about your event. E-mail him at floydsldaverfiteomcast.net. FLOYD
