The organization of my life is tight. Time is stingy with me, and I, in return, feel completely comfortable in returning the favor. There are many things that I simply don’t do because of time. Things like television and shopping and fluttering about socially. Things that consume time like a starving man might gulp down a hamburger - large disproportionate blocks of time simply disappearing, without a trace, like your own life, swallowed whole without the memory of the taste of even a single day.
So I have chosen to slow down. I am selfish with my time. Stingy. Careful. Aware.
But I do watch movies. I watch movies because I enjoy stories. And I enjoy stories because I have always enjoyed books. I was the boy under the blankets with a flashlight, reading late into the night and early into the morning. I was the young man content to sit in one new school after another, always the new kid, aware but unaffected by the curious whispers all around me. The power of the stories to draw me in was always greater then the life going on around me. The curious whispers of thirty years ago were like the constant noise of a television that simply needed to be tuned out.
But I do watch movies. And sometimes I watch a movie that I realize is drawing me in tight and somehow slipping into place with the tightness of my own life and time. I make room for it because it feels right. I become excited about buying it, so that I can watch it again and share it with friends and know that it is close at hand. Last night, I realized that Stone Reader was that kind of movie.
If you like books, you should see this film. If you like thinking about the authors behind the books, their struggles and lives and the forces that drive them, you should see this film. If you have ever lost yourself in the passion of words, and would like to see how this passion has the power to change lives, you should see this film. Because that is exactly what Mark Moskowitz, the director of Stone Reader, has done with this film. He has turned a passion into something powerful.
The back cover of the DVD case reads as follows:
Stone Reader is a constantly absorbing and moving film about the power of books to change our lives and one man’s passionate search to solve a real-life literary mystery.
In 1972, Mark Moskowitz, then aged 18, read a rave review of a novel called The Stones of Summer. He bought it, but couldn’t get past the first few pages. Twenty-five years later he tried again, and this time fell in love with it.
Looking for other works by author Dow Mossman, he found no mention of either Mossman or his novel, which was long out of print. Thus begins one of the most enthralling mystery stories of recent years.
Traveling the country, he befriends critics, agents, and editors in the quest to discover how such a well-received book and it’s author could have vanished completely from the scene. And while the journey is unusually cinematic, often hilariously funny, and ultimately poignant, it is also a riveting reminder of how some stories are so potent that people change their lives forever seeking the source.
And if you make all your movie viewing choices based on reviews, here you go.
I don’t think that I have ever had a movie make me want to read a book as much as Stone Reader made me want to read Mossman’s book, The Stones of Summer , which is once again being published, a direct result of one man’s passion for this story. And it is Moskowitz’s enthusiasm for this story which lifted me out of my chair and into my car and only minutes later placed me between the comforting aisles of a local bookstore. The movie itself says very little about the book’s actual story, content to talk around the book, leaving the discovery solely up to the reader.
Only a lover of books would know how to tell the story of a book without actually talking about the book. Moskowitz, as you will clearly see in the movie, if you decide to watch it, is in my mind such a person. Born, it seems, not only with the gift of reading, but the gift of storytelling.
The curious part of the story for me was the surprise of the close physical connection between Mossman and my own past. Not just the setting, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were I had spent several years of my own childhood, but the timing as well. The early 1970’s, when Mossman wandered the very same streets as I had, him struggling to complete a manuscript that would push him to his limits, while I simply struggled with the everyday challenge of completing childhood. Mossman, his own past still fresh in his memory, was writing about the life that I was at that very moment experiencing first hand. True or imagined, the possibility alone grabbed me and held me close.
* * * * *
I have just now, returned from the bookstore, victorious.
When August came, thick as a dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and then they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood.
- opening sentence of Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer