June 7, 2010 Terry Southern Month Terry Southern In Full By Thessaly La Force © Steve SchapiroLast week, Lorin declared June 2010 “Terry Southern Month,” a pronouncement that was greeted with even more excitement and enthusiasm than we had anticipated. (“Hell yeah. One of my faves. Bring on June,” tweeted a reader. Southern “makes me want to go out and do things,” wrote another.) We ran an excerpt from an interview Mike Golden conducted with Southern that appeared in the spring of 1996 (issue 138). After the jump is, as promised, the exchange in full, where Southern discusses making Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper, and the missing pie-fight scene from Dr. Strangelove: Read More
June 1, 2010 Terry Southern Month Terry Southern Month By Lorin Stein Terry Southern, © Steve Schapiro.It’s buck season, the sun is defying all forecasts, the Vanity Fair softball team is atremble at the prospect of tonight’s grudge match, and to greet the arrival of summer we at The Paris Review Daily are hereby declaring June 2010 “Terry Southern Month.” For the next twenty-nine days stay tuned for a celebration of the longtime contributor who wrote Dr. Strangelove, The Magic Christian, and the pornographic novel Candy, inter alia. As George Plimpton explained in 1996, the year of Southern’s death: Terry was in a a sense largely responsible for the birth of this magazine back in 1953. In the early stages of publishing a Paris-based New Yorker imitation entitled The Paris News-Post, its editors, Peter Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes, were so impressed by the strength of The Accident, a story submitted by their friend Terry (a section of his novel Flash and Filigree) that they decided to scrap The New Yorker imitation and start a literary magazine. The story was incorporated in the first number. Thus, The Paris Review. Here, for starters, is an interview by Mike Golden from issue 138 in which Southern discusses Paris in the fifties, making Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper (RIP), and the famous “lost” pie-fight from Dr. Strangelove: Read More