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Product Description A scintillating collection of inspirations for Wes Anderson's star-studded tenth film The French Dispatch--fascinating essays on the expatriate experience in Paris by some of the twentieth century's finest writers. A glimpse of post-war France through the eyes and words of 14 (mostly) expatriate journalists including Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, A.J. Liebling, S.N. Behrman, Luc Sante, Joseph Mitchell, and Lillian Ross; plus, portraits of their editors William Shawn and New Yorker founder Harold Ross. Together: they invented modern magazine journalism. Includes an introductory interview by Susan Morrison with Anderson about transforming fact into a fiction and the creation of his homage to these exceptional reporters. About the Author Wes Anderson's films include Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr Fox, Isle of Dogs and Moonrise Kingdom. The French Dispatch will be released on October 22, 2021 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Art Talker Calvin Tomkins 1977 A fiery redhead with the speed of light, a cloud of blue chiffon, and a hearty “This lecture is about a very good-looking man with rather thin legs who was born just under five hundred years ago and had ideas about hospitality which most of us would find it hard to put into practice”—who but Rosamond Bernier, talking about François I of France, on a recent Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? We are not alone in thinking Mme. Bernier the most stylish art talker around. A recent lecture series in the Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium was sold out two months in advance. Her invigoratingly literate television interviews with Philip Johnson, the architect, on CBS-TV’s “Camera Three” made the three Sunday mornings when they were shown astonishingly bearable for a much larger audience. Could we catch up with this scintillating creature (who has been married since 1975 to John Russell, the Times’s equally scintillating art critic) and importune her with a few questions? We could and we did. “Imagine being paid to talk!” Mme. Bernier said to us over lunch in a midtown French restaurant the other day. “I’ve been a listener all my professional life, and here I am talking everybody’s head off.” Mme. Bernier’s lecturing self, it seems, rose quite recently from the ashes of her former, publishing-and-writing self. After twenty-odd very busy years in Paris, where she and her ex-husband, Georges Bernier, founded the magazine L’OEil in 1955 and made it into one of the century’s best art journals, she was, as she put it, left “absolutely flat” when, in 1969, she lost both Bernier and L’OEil through divorce. “All at once, I had nothing to do,” she said. “I just cried all day.” Friends did what they could to cheer her up, but nothing really helped until Michael Mahoney, an art historian, persuaded her to give fourteen lectures on modern art to his students at Trinity College in Hartford in the fall of 1970. “I was terrified at the start, but it worked,” she said. “I’m probably the only person you know who hasn’t been psychoanalyzed. Those lectures literally saved my life.” Mme. Bernier, who was born in Philadelphia but grew up mostly in London, approached her subject from the point of view of an active participant. Having arrived in Paris in 1946 as European feature editor for the American Vogue, she followed her natural bent toward art by becoming a close friend of virtually all the important European artists of the period. Picasso took to her because she spoke fluent Spanish as well as French, and she was the first to see and report on his postwar paintings. Matisse saw to it that she wrote the first article on the chapel he was designing in Vence. Miró, Braque, Max Ernst, and many other artists gave her exclusive interviews and became lifelong Bernier-philes, and from 1955 on they all took a personal interest in the development of L’OEil. In her