US English-Catcher in the Rye: Salinger and Film

If the film rights to JD Salinger's cult novel do go on sale, who could possibly direct it – or play Holden Caulfield?

On hearing of JD Salinger's recent death, most fans probably experienced a single emotion: sadness. Over in Hollywood, however, the hills shook with the cackling of a hundred avaricious studio execs. Finally, someone will get to make The Catcher in the Rye film.

Salinger never wanted one when he was alive. A letter to a Hollywood producer in 1957 makes it plain. Noting it's a "very novelistic novel", with the bulk of the book taking place inside Holden Caulfield's head, Salinger admitted what was left could, theoretically, be transferred to the big screen, but that the idea was "odious enough to keep me from selling the rights". He'd already been burnt by 1949's My Foolish Heart – a critical flop based on his 1948 short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.

Yet now that might change. In the same letter, Salinger talks of "leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy". And last weekend, the Sunday Times suggested it could happen sooner rather than later, due to a tax loophole caused by the failure of Congress to renew death tax legislation. If his family sell the rights now, they keep all the cash.

But who should make it? And who should play Holden? The list of those who've already tried would make a great dinner party: Sam Goldwyn, Steven Spielberg, Jerry Lewis, Marlon Brando, Billy Wilder, Jack Nicholson, even Harvey Weinstein.

Would Spielberg still be up for it, you wonder? He seems the obvious choice, yet you can't help feel it's the down-with-the-kids Spielberg of The Goonies (Richard Donner directed, but it was Spielberg's story) you'd want, not the one currently heading towards late middle age. The Coen brothers – specialising in the disaffected and desperate – could do it, yet perhaps their films are too stylised, too ironic, too arch and dry (in short, too Coen) for a book so immersive and un-ironic. Ditto the knowing coolness of an auteur such as Wes Anderson.

Terrence Malick – rumoured to be working on a Catcher in the Rye adaptation in 2006, and himself considered the Salinger of directors for a while – would be a popular choice. The voiceovers so artfully done in The Thin Red Line and The New World could be used to stay true to the novel's core, while his meditative, impressionistic style would surely suit a film essentially set in one person's head.

Yet a voiceover does run the risk of that ultimate nightmare: Catcher in the Rye meets The Wonder Years. But who, then? A good alternative might be Paul Thomas Anderson. With Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, he's shown he can paint complicated main characters while saying very little. Even Spike Jonze must be worth a try, fresh from adapting another coming-of-age classic in Where the Wild Things Are.

Yet perhaps the biggest problem will be casting Holden himself. Leonardo DiCaprio, John Cusack and Tobey Maguire have all previously been mooted. Salinger called Holden "essentially unactable. A Sensitive, Intelligent, Talented Young Actor in a Reversible Coat wouldn't nearly be enough". The easiest way to grasp catastrophe from the jaws of success would surely be to cast a next-gen teen idol – a Robert Pattinson or a Zac Efron – but even the more realistic candidates don't feel quite right.

There's Joseph Gordon Levitt (too old), Anton Yelchin (too Russian), Michael Cera (too geeky), or Jessie Eisenberg (too Jew-fro). Emile Hirsch feels like the closest fit, but you can't help thinking the best Holden will be the true unknown that no-one expects; someone unsullied by fame's own story, able to be the Holden we imagined, in the way Salinger himself might have approved.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/feb/10/catcher-in-the-rye-film

Early in his career, Salinger expressed a willingness to have his work adapted for the screen.^[47] In 1949, a critically panned film version of his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was released; renamed My Foolish Heart, the film took great liberties with Salinger's plot and is widely considered to be among the reasons that Salinger refused to allow any subsequent film adaptations of his work.^[17][48] The enduring success of The Catcher in the Rye, however, has resulted in repeated attempts to secure the novel's screen rights.

When The Catcher in the Rye was first released, many offers were made to adapt it for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn, producer of My Foolish Heart.^[48] In a letter written in the early 1950s, Salinger spoke of mounting a play in which he would play the role of Holden Caulfield opposite Margaret O'Brien, and, if he couldn't play the part himself, to "forget about it." Almost 50 years later, the writer Joyce Maynard definitively concluded, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J.D. Salinger."^[50]

Salinger told Maynard in the 1970s that Jerry Lewis "tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden,"^[50] despite Lewis not having read the novel until he was in his thirties.^[43] Film industry figures including Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have tried to make a film adaptation.^[51] In an interview with Premiere, John Cusack commented that his one regret about turning 21 was that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield. Writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive attempts to snare the novel's rights:

Of course I read The Catcher in the Rye... Wonderful book. I loved it. I pursued it. I wanted to make a picture out of it. And then one day a young man came to the office of Leland Hayward, my agent, in New York, and said, 'Please tell Mr. Leland Hayward to lay off. He's very, very insensitive.' And he walked out. That was the entire speech. I never saw him. That was J.D. Salinger and that was Catcher in the Rye.^[52]

In 1961, Salinger denied Elia Kazan permission to direct a stage adaptation of Catcher for Broadway.^[53] Later, Salinger's agents received bids for the Catcher film rights from Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg, neither of which was even passed on to Salinger for consideration.^[54]

In 2003, the BBC television program The Big Read featured The Catcher in the Rye, interspersing discussions of the novel with "a series of short films that featured an actor playing J. D. Salinger's adolescent antihero, Holden Caulfield."^[53] The show defended its unlicensed adaptation of the novel by claiming to be a "literary review", and no major charges were filed.

After Salinger died in 2010, Phyllis Westberg, who was Salinger's agent at Harold Ober Associates, stated that nothing has changed in terms of licensing film, television, or stage rights of his works.^[55] A letter written by Salinger in 1957 revealed that he was open to an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye released after his death. He wrote: "Firstly, it is possible that one day the rights will be sold. Since there's an ever-looming possibility that I won't die rich, I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy. It pleasures me no end, though, I might quickly add, to know that I won't have to see the results of the transaction." Salinger also wrote that he believed his novel was not suitable for film treatment, and that translating Holden Caulfield's first-person narrative into voice-over and dialogue would be contrived.^[56]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye#In_film