Alan Greenberg is a writer, film director, film producer, and
photographer. He worked on Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear and Bernardo
Bertolucci’s 1900 and with Werner Herzog on his classic screenplays
Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, and Heart of Glass. Greenberg’s
documentary Land of Look Behind was awarded the Chicago
International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo award, and he is the author
of Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of
“Heart of Glass.”
Stanley Crouch is a columnist, novelist, and essayist and a founder
of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is the author of many books,
including Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz.
Martin Scorsese is an Academy Award–winning director, screenwriter,
producer, actor, and film historian. He was executive producer for
the acclaimed seven-part film series The Blues.
“Reads like a great American novel . . . The definite book of any
kind on the gifted, eccentric blues legend.” —Pitchfork
“It’s about time.” —Bob Dylan
“Finally someone has captured the central feel of this master
musician and his times, and that man is Alan Greenberg. Take my
word for it.” —Keith Richards“Magnificently rendered . . . This is
no mere biopic. [Greenberg's] Johnson is a changeling,
flesh-and-blood but mutable and secretive, and he dwells in a world
of workaday magic, where his meeting with the devil takes place at
the moviehouse in front of a western, and where Charlie Patton’s
funeral turns into a ferocious soul-claiming contest between
Johnson and the Rev. Sin-Killer Griffin. Greenberg not only evokes
Johnson in a way that actually enlarges our view of him, he also
depicts the blues world of the time, from Mississippi to Texas, in
all its variegated splendor and misery.” —Luc Sante, New York
Review of Books“It may be the best movie you’ll see all year—even
if it’s just inside your head.” —Entertainment Weekly“Love in Vain
has accomplished what I have tried to do for a long time: that is,
to development screenplays as a new genre of literature which has
its own natural right of existence.” —Werner Herzog“The resonances
of Robert Johnson’s mysterious life and equally mysterious death
continue to echo through American music, from blues to country to
rock to soul. Alan Greenberg has thoroughly researched and
understood the facts of Robert Johnson’s career, but more
importantly he has boldly and brilliantly reimagined the myth. Love
in Vain is surreal in the original sense of the word; it transforms
the reality of Robert Johnson, his time, his place and his art,
into a super-reality—sharp and vivid yet as luminous and elusive as
a dream.” —Robert Palmer, New York Times
“Love in Vain is a blazingly readable screenplay that I recommend
without reservation.” —Greil Marcus“A great, great screenplay.”
—David Lynch“Love in Vain is a masterpiece of historical
significance.” —Memphis Commercial-Appeal“Since facts about Robert
Johnson are almost as hard to come by as facts about Shakespeare,
Greenberg proposes to give flesh to myth instead . . . he makes it
happen, too. Drenched in alcohol and bodily fluids, this is
gut-bucket romanticism at its most credible. By imagining the
Mississippi Delta's churches, shacks, cotton fields, and
(especially) jooks so vividly, Greenberg helps us see and hear why
blues buffs are obsessed with all that raunch and suffering
transport.” —Robert Christgau“A quantum leap of the
imagination.” —Dave Marsh“Wondrous and vivid.” —The Portland
Tribune “The really remarkable thing about Love in Vain is the
way it plays off the mystery of Robert Johnson rather than attempt
to penetrate it in literal terms. The screenplay represents the
imaginative embodiment of a world, a world of myth and reality,
both prosaic and poetic, a world in which Robert Johnson, or
perhaps the idea of Robert Johnson, could spring up. I don’t think
this milieu has ever been effectively portrayed before, and I
consider it little short of a miracle that Alan Greenberg should
have captured it so graphically, so colorfully, so dramatically.”
—Peter Guralnick
Ask a Question About this Product More... |