11/10/2022 0 Comments Mousterpiece theatre![]() Premièring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including “Reds” and “Good Will Hunting.” Fortunately, in the upcoming film “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. Alda’s version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charm-much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice. He got the personality totally wrong, too. #Mousterpiece theatre movieAlan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was-old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English. ![]() My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. ![]()
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