Picture 14-year-old Tim Blake Nelson sitting at dinner in Oklahoma, delivering a 25-word book report on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The assignment came from his father; literary discussion was expected to ensue. “I grew up at a dinner table at which frivolous conversation rarely occurred,” Nelson said. “Books were really revered in our home.”
We spoke over Zoom about Nelson’s particularly literary childhood while he was at a film festival in Poland. His second novel, “Superhero,” hits shelves this winter. It’s a gentle Hollywood satire — and any resemblance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, you know, coincidental.
As an actor, Nelson broke through in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” co-starring with George Clooney and John Turturro. With his hangdog face and authentic Oklahoma twang, he might have spent the last 25 years playing dim-witted yokels. But he’s carved out an expansive and varied career as an actor, moving between blockbusters, indie film sets and the MCU.
“Superhero” riffs on those experiences, with the details obscured by what Nelson called “a lot of smudging.” This kaleidoscope of a novel follows several characters trying to make a franchise film for a comics-based studio — the star, his producer wife, the director, the cinematographer and more. Each has a rich past wanting to create art, a yearning that eventually comes into conflict with the project of making a $160-million movie.
Take, as an example, the director of photography, a character named Javier Benavidez. As an adolescent, he learns about the process of light and shadow transforming into photographic images, described in vivid detail. “That chapter used to be twice as long,” Nelson said. “Photography has been a lifelong passion of mine, and it was absolutely unbridled pleasure being able to write about the process of putting images on film.” Benavidez’s artistic skills are what the studio wants for the film — within limits.
There is an obvious pleasure in portraying Hollywood throughout the novel. Nelson invents a studio, Sparta Comics, and the franchise character, Major Machina, giving each a full backstory. The attention to detail extends into how the character was developed post-World War II and how they’re updating it to the present day.
“It was certainly my intention, to use a world I know really, really well, to examine bigger issues in American culture,” Nelson said. “So you’ve got on the surface level, the big question of why did these movies come out of America? Why did comic books come out of America? And why did they capture the imagination of not only America, but the entire world for well over a decade?” Or, he suggested, even longer. “And is that a good thing?” Characters in the novel grapple with all these questions.
At its center is the star, Peter Compton, a larger-than-life genuine movie star, a Sexiest Man Alive-type who has had a public reckoning with his addiction and recovery. Aided by his wife, he’s reached a very good place: “The more time he spent with her, the better his life got, as if the trust of such a cohesively decent soul engendered success in anyone closely associated, particularly as pertained to business opportunities,” Nelson writes. The novel is full of these understated, wry contradictions — a decent soul with a gift for making good deals.
Compton is impossibly charming, effortfully erudite, and enjoys the status that comes with his stardom. He can make big demands, like bringing along his private chef and upending the production schedule at the last minute.
Something like that really did happen. “There is nothing in the novel that I haven’t either experienced personally or heard from a very reliable source,” Nelson said. Which we can take to include the anxious director who brings along what he insists is not an emotional support dog, a star saging the set each day and an assistant producer who appears with a luxury sports car way above his pay grade.
Nelson is actually quite a polymath. First came photography, then came acting. The first film he wrote and directed, “Eye of God” starring Martha Plimpton, was released in 1997 and adapted from his own stage play. He’s written and directed indie films, including “The Gray Zone” and the forthcoming “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd.” He’s written and performed in plays, most often found in New York. He’s also done plenty of TV, perhaps most notably in 2019’s “Watchmen.”
Nelson has more than 100 screen acting credits, including two Steven Spielberg films (“Minority Report,” “Lincoln”) and two Coen Brothers pictures, including their last collaboration, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” for which he learned the guitar from his son.
Given that history, it might be surprising to hear that Nelson, so well known as an actor, thinks novels can reveal things film can’t. “Pictures cannot take you into what a character is thinking and feeling. You can infer, but you can’t know in the way that you can in a novel,” he said. “The writer can tell you as close to the truth about what a person is thinking and feeling and seeing as you’re going to get.”
Since he was a child, Nelson has been a reader, particularly devoted to fiction. “I’ve been reading one novel or another nonstop since I was about 9 or 10 years old,” he said. He easily reels off a list of the last dozen books or so he’s read, including “Sons and Daughters” by Chaim Grade, “The Oppermanns” by Lion Feuchtwanger and Lawrence Wright’s novel “The Human Scale.” But it took him until his 50s to turn that avocation into a vocation (of a modest sort).
He’s published both his novels with Unnamed Press, an L.A.-based independent, beginning with “City of Blows,” which came out in 2023. “My agent sent it to Chris Heiser at Unnamed. I really love that house because they’re very small and he’s a really good editor,” Nelson said. It was Heiser who suggested cutting some of the text about photography.
“The photography chapter was really fun for me twice as long, but it was going to be a barrier to entry, because that’s early in the novel. I had to be more selective than I wanted to be, just by virtue of trying to make the thing work better,” Nelson admitted. Then he added, “I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Ezra Pound’s edit of ‘The Waste Land,’ and he cut three quarters of it.” It’s the facsimile edition of T.S. Eliot’s original draft with Pound’s handwritten edits. “You can see where Pound went through, you know, one antisemite to another, and made one of the most extraordinary poems of the 20th century.” It’s a literary reference that would make his parents proud.
The post Tim Blake Nelson has played the weirdo. His new book satirizes the freaks who run Hollywood appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
