Misfits Country

Those who enjoyed Knight's excellent "Johnny D." will again appreciate the rapid-fire style of storytelling as told from the rotating points of view of the central characters. As mentioned in some of the other reviews, this would make a great movie, though the casting would indeed be difficult due to the sheer iconic nature of two of the principals. Maybe enough time has passed, though, for younger audiences (the largest portion of the movie-going public) would be willing to accept such a reach.. Movie historians should consider this book a "must-read." Casual readers will also quickly be drawn into the engaging narrative "flow" of the book, too. I'm already looking forward to Knight's next book.

I've read quite a bit on the subject of the making of THE MISFITS, and I cannot imagine a better book on the subject. Knight captures every aspect of the real persons involved in the making of the film, good, bad and appalling. Knowing that Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift will soon be dead adds to the poignancy of the story. I've never read a better treatment of Marilyn. She is exasperating, appealing, loving, caring and on the skids. Buy this book. It is riveting.

REVIEW BY CHARLES ALVERSON: `Misfits Country' by Arthur Winfield Knight (Tres Picos Press, March, 2008) It was the boiling summer of 1960. Three famous actors, a celebrated director and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright arrived in Nevada, USA, to make a film the playwright, Arthur Miller, had written for one of the stars, Marilyn Monroe, his wife at the time. The film was `The Misfits,' the other stars were Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift and the director was John Huston, creator of many great films including `The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and `The Maltese Falcon'. The occasion was a fit setting for a classic motion picture and a personal disaster for most of the principals as portrayed by Arthur Winfield Knight in a work of fiction that reads as if it were a documentary written by someone who'd probed the mind and soul of those involved. In Knight's imagination--bolstered by the mythology surrounding such luminaries: Marilyn Monroe is a passive, drug-addled, constantly late nymphomaniac who despises her husband and can be consoled only by Paula Strasberg, the drama coach/masseuse who followed her from New York. `The Misfits' was her last completed film. Clark Gable is an aging screen immortal whose youthful excesses and efforts to maintain a macho image at age 59 threaten his life and his happiness with his wife, pregnant with his first child. He was to die within two weeks after shooting finished. Montgomery Clift is an insecure homosexual addict mourning the lost beauty of his face, reconstructed after a car wreck, and scorned by the he-men Gable and Huston. He would die at 45, having destroyed his system with drugs and booze. John Huston is the hard-drinking, hard-gambling ringmaster of this circus of human wrecks. Despairing of maintaining order, he coddled Monroe and Clift, sometimes directed when drunk and took time out to go camel racing. Arthur Miller is the odd man out, the Eastern intellectual in a nest of Hollywood neurotics, despised by his soon-to-be ex-wife and constantly rewriting scenes from the film to salvage Monroe's unraveling ability to play the heroine of the film. This is Arthur Knight's raw material, the puppets he manipulates through gyrations that seem as familiar as they are bizarre. By chance, he was present in Dayton, Nevada, when `The Misfits' was being filmed, but Knight claims that did not influence the writing of this novel. We think we know a lot about Monroe's tragic life as a sex symbol and something about the lives of Gable and Clift. And certainly much of what Knight writes rings true to what we think we know, but the line between fact and fiction in `Misfits Country is imperceptible. This is perhaps the danger of this genre. Will Arthur Knight's imaginings fuse with the `reality' of the lives and events he portrays? Or are the facts and myths so conflated that one cannot tell--or care--which is which? Knight's version of the making of `The Misfits' is exciting, sexy, tort

Arthur Knight's "Misfits Country," for those of us either old enough to recall or be adequately studied in cinema to harbor curiosity about what may have actually occurred in the minds and lives of the cast members of Hollywood's hot list during the shooting of what has been univocally described as one of the most difficult film productions ever undertaken, reads like a dream we may have never dreamt ... but always considered. Arthur Miller's script for The Misfits, directed by John Houston in 1961 and strongly supported by then A-list actors Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift marked the last curtain call for two of America's greatest film stars ... they just didn't know it yet. And ... who would've? Such retrospective analysis provided the fictional fodder for Knight, who delves deeply into the "what if?" He presents the reader with scenarios created from actual, factual research and a sharper mind for speculative scenarios with even more finely honed prose to explore the dynamics of what happened on the set ... or what may have, behind the sets and soundstages in the personal challenges facing these stars whose inner lights were dimming in a rapidly fading horizon of personal illusion simultaneously melding with that of the public silver screen. Using the tension of Miller's and Monroe's failing marriage sizzling in the Reno, Nevada desert heat, accentuated by an increasingly inebriated Houston who had indeed lost his "direction," Knight explores the breadth and depth of these rich and famous personas America adored, and insightfully presents through his inner-dramatic format what may have really led to the end of the epic drama, the erratic lives of those who embodied it, and an era when a movie-going public departed theaters in awe, never knowing what dirt might lie within the folds of the theater's curtains. They bought the dream - Knight didn't. The documented reality of the film's labored production is, in and of itself, tabloid material, but Knight exercises his focused writing to cast the characters in different lights - sometimes soft and forgiving, and others harsh and unyielding. Between the novel's bindings and among its pages, readers become privy to thoughts, attitudes, intentions and actions stripped of a Hollywood mystique that can never be proven. Nor, however ... can his suppositions ever be outright denied. And in such ... the drama within a drama emerges. The film, after much delay, opened to mixed reviews, no doubt born from an expectation of audiences who were awaiting established superstar performances, but had no clue about a drunken and compulsively gambling director; the downright nasty marital discord of America's blonde-bombshell sweetheart stoned out of her beautiful gourd on drugs and alcohol during filming; the ever-widening gap of her marriage to acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller; or Monroe's implied liaisons with "Monty," a closeted bisexual who sported a drug usage profile

In his novel "Misfits Country," Arthur Knight imaginatively creates a movie within a movie, using the actors of the 47-year-old film The Misfits as characters in his new movie about their dysfunctional relationships as they are concurrently creating The Misfits. Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Arthur Miller, and John Huston star in Knight's movie which has an atmosphere and residue of a bygone era, most of their best work (Some Like It Hot, From Here to Eternity, Gone With the Wind, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Death of a Salesman) being done well before The Misfits. Knight creates an intimate, documentary-style piece, employing cinematic writing that immerses the reader in the day-to-day saga of the fictionalized lives of Marilyn, Monty, Clark, John, and Arthur. At times, he uses a close-up, allowing the reader entree into the intimate details of the characters' personal challenges. We feel their angst; we're told their self-doubts; we taste the martinis, whiskey, and champagne they drink; we smell Huston's nearly constant cigar and feel overwhelmed by the fumes of so many cigarettes smoked by Monty, Arthur, and Clark. We pity the pain, suffering, and frustration of Marilyn and Monty as they attempt to confront their ever-present demons. We sense Arthur's awkwardness, his inability to fit in with the others. Clark, much older than his 59 years and in bad health, knows who he is and recognizes he doesn't have a lot of time left; he looks forward to the birth of his son. John has a picture to complete; he'll get paid and he can pay his gambling debts; after this film, he'll move on to the next one. Knight racks focus and we tunnel to the arid Nevada landscape, an integral character in his story. The unwavering, searing, bright sun forces us to squint. The roasting heat across the salt flats keeps us wiping our faces and necks in an unsuccessful effort to remove constant perspiration. At other times, Knight utilizes flashbacks for insight into present behavior. He'll then flash forward, showing the characters pondering their future, wondering where they will be in five or ten years, especially poignant because we know several of them will be dead. Arthur Knight's "Misfits Country" is an enticing, surprisingly realistic work of fiction.