Disco lives!

Whit Stillman gives Last Days a novel twist

Whit Stillman, who takes reviews of his films extremely seriously, has what he admits is a myopic and manichæan view of the worth of critics. Those who liked his last movie are splendidly talented; those who wrote negatively can roast in Hell. And it's only his last movie he cares about: reviews of his earlier works, pro and con, are forgotten and irrelevant.

Well, I liked Metropolitan (1990) fine but I gave a pretty thumbs-down notice to Barcelona (1994), and when we've talked, Stillman has politely suggested that I missed the point, that maybe I need to see that one again. But the important thing is that I'm a true-blue booster for The Last Days of Disco (1998), his most recent feature, so we've grown chummy at various festivals. And now our friendship is sealed because Stillman knows how much I genuinely love the novel he's just published through Farrar, Straus and Giroux: The Last Days of Disco -- With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards, which transfers to the page his delightful movie.

Actually, it's a faux novelization. The conceit of the book is that Jimmy Steinway, the young-and-failed ad-man from the picture, has been hired by Castle Rock Entertainment to write a novelization of the film story in which he appeared. He's the appropriate character to be offered the writing assignment because he was at the epicenter of the movie's several stories and crucial moments: trying to sneak business clients into the disco, and being backstage there as witness for the drugs and money laundering; falling head-over-heels for lovely Alice (Chloë Sevigny) but becoming involved with bitchy Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale).

So Jimmy tells the Last Days of Disco story again, reiterating in print the plot and dialogue the way a faithful-to-the-source "novelizationist" is supposed to but filling in cracks in some scenes, expanding many others with rich, nuggety writing and philosophic rumination, supplying a telling foreword and also a smashing, moving epilogue that brings the early-'80s Disco ensemble to the end of the '90s. Jimmy's got the story down, but credit the true-life creator of the novel of The Last Days, Stillman, whose beguiling book not only evokes J.D. Salinger but at times suggests -- the prose is that refined! -- that a discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript has landed miraculously in your lap.

"The humor is like the 1920s, the New Yorker when it was funny," Stillman explained of his book when I brought him here recently to speak at Boston University. He was thinking of such forgotten writers as Wolcott Gibbs, "though I've gotten a rap as a wanna-be Fitzgerald, trying to do Fitzgerald in the '80s with some jokes.

"Jimmy stepped forward pretty early as to who would be the narrator. Some people think he disappears a bit in the movie, but those who read my screenplay felt he was `the glue.' He's an unreliable narrator, but not that unreliable. Actually, my model was a classic 1930s Boston novel, John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, which purports to being a privately printed memoir by Apley's somewhat dimwitted and terribly proper best friend. Like this friend, Jimmy is a somewhat awkward first-time writer. At a certain point, I cheated a bit and made Jimmy's prose less awkward than it should have been.

"I've never read a real novelization. If I've already seen the movie, why would the novelization add anything, if it's by a hired writer doing a paste-up job? My challenge was to make my book an actual novel that pretends to be a novelization. Practically every word spoken in the movie is in the book, but sometimes in different places. Jimmy covers the movie's scenes, but he also takes it his way. Hopefully, there's so much, much more."

What's Stillman doing lately, besides penning his brilliant novel? He's been commuting between Paris -- a wife and two daughters -- and a New York office where, among journalistic dabblings, he's had fun providing gossip for the New York Post's famous Page 6. His long-planned screen bio of the American Revolution's Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox," fell through, pre-empted by The Patriot. Potential film projects include an adaptation of Red Azalea, Anchee Min's chilling saga of China's Cultural Revolution.

RIP: JEAN PETERS, at 73, from leukemia, one among a host of sexy, brooding Hollywood-contract brunettes in the late 1940s. Note the similarity of their screen names: Jane Russell, Gene Tierney, Jennifer Jones, Jeanne Crain, Jean Simmons. Howard Hughes savored such dark-haired beauties, discovering Jane Russell, marrying Terry Moore, then marrying Peters in 1957 (they divorced in 1970). He got her to quit movies after 19 films, including starring opposite Tyrone Power in The Captain from Castile (1947), Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata! (1952), and Burt Lancaster in Apache (1954).

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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