Get Our Your Calendars

I have very excellent reasons why I won't be able to attend Happy Ending on November 17th, but I'm still kicking myself in anticipation of missing what promises to be a heck of a show. First off, Nelly Reifler will be filling in for regular host Amanda Stern, who's off at MacDowell for the fall. Then there's the literary guests: Julian Rubinstein, Elizabeth Gold, and Hal Niedzviecki. Why am I telling you this now? Well, pretty much because Mediabistro had the smarts to get Rubinstein talking about his amazing true crime tale, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber--but then, calling it true crime is a bit like calling George Plimpton's Paper Lion a sports story or Tom Bissell's Chasing the Sea a travelogue.

[I]t might sound strange, but one movie that struck me about this story was Life is Beautiful. The reason I say it is that one of the things I loved most about the story was that on the surface it was a comedy; it was this hilarious caper. But beneath the surface it was this heartbreaking story, the classic, archetypal, underdog struggle to survive and be somebody. And I saw an opportunity. No one had really looked at this story as a comedy before. It was obviously written about and covered heavily in Hungary, but it was just a crime story. No one in Hungary had reported that he was a Zamboni driver; no one had talked about his pelt smuggling. The other person I thought of is Elmore Leonard. I had the instinct that this was not a story to be dealt with straightforwardly, I wanted to look at it just slightly askance. What happened was too crazy to be played totally straight.