Summary
The Return of the Player (Grove)
In this conversation, the subject of the immorality of Hollywood gives way to the subject of the immorality of wealth, which in turn, surprisingly, gives way to the question of whether the soul exists. If the soul does not exist, is there any immorality? Do fictional characters have souls? Gradually we uncover the moral equations underlying Tolkin's universe.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:07.0 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:11.0 | You are a very special breed. |
| 0:15.0 | Or you are the only animal. |
| 0:18.3 | Who can think, who can reason, who can read. |
| 0:22.3 | From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:26.9 | Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Michael Tolkien, who has just published the return of the |
| 0:32.4 | player, which is published by Grove. He is the author, of course, of the player, both the book and the screenplay |
| 0:39.6 | of the movie, the novels Among the Dead and Under Radar. He's the author of the two screenplays |
| 0:48.5 | he directed, The Rapture and the New Age. And in this book, Griffin Mill, has reached the end of his stint with the Hollywood |
| 0:58.4 | studio and is preparing to encounter real money. The book takes place in both a real community and real situation, but one so diabolical |
| 1:18.2 | and preposterous that one is forced to believe him when he says he's worried in the first |
| 1:24.3 | paragraph about being down to his last $ million dollars. This is, for better |
| 1:31.2 | or worse, a world that exists, and it's his desire to get hold of some really brutal, |
| 1:39.0 | some savage money that animates his quest in this book. |
| 1:45.7 | Now, this is not a satire, but it is a book that is a book that borders on that because the world has become something we would have been laughing at for thoughts like this 20 years ago. |
| 2:08.6 | Yes? |
| 2:10.9 | I take him completely seriously. |
| 2:15.7 | When I wrote it, and it was that sentence, which was the beginning of the novel for me, |
| 2:20.7 | I was just lying in a chair at home, and the thought came to me, |
| 2:24.5 | and then 10 days later, I had 70 pages. |
| 2:27.1 | So it was that image which began it all. |
... |
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