Kaufman, Millard 1917-

PERSONAL:

Born 1917; married; children: two. Education: Attended Johns Hopkins University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA.

CAREER:

Writer and screenwriter. Worked for MGM film studio, Los Angeles, CA, for thirteen years; cocreator of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo; worked as a journalist for newspapers. Military service: U.S. Marines, served in World War II.

MEMBER:

Writers Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Academy Award nominations for screenwriting for Bad Day at Black Rock and Take the High Ground!

WRITINGS:

Plots and Characters: A Screenwriter on Screenwriting, Really Great Books (Los Angeles, CA), 1999.

Bowl of Cherries (novel), McSweeney's (New York, NY), 2007.

SCREENPLAYS

Bad Day at Black Rock, M-G-M (United States), 1954.

Raintree County, Loew's (United States), 1957.

(With John Collier) The War Lord, Universal Pictures (United States), 1965.

Living Free; An Open Road/Highroad Presentation, Columbia Pictures (United States), 1972.

Also author or coauthor of numerous other screenplays, including Never So Few and Take the High Ground!

SIDELIGHTS:

Millard Kaufman has spent many years as a Hollywood screenwriter and was nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays of Take the High Ground! and Bad Day at Black Rock. The latter film, which starred Spencer Tracy, features a mysterious man who comes into a small town asking questions and soon learns that a large contingent of the townspeople, hyped up on patriotic fervor following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, have killed a local Japanese rancher and burned his house down. Kaufman is also noted as the cocreator of the cartoon character Mister Magoo, who was based on one of Kaufman's uncles who had bad eyesight. Kaufman continued to write screenplays into his eighties but found a dwindling demand for his work. As he grew older, he discovered that not many people were interested in screenwriters who were in their eighties. As a result, he decided to turn to novel writing, and his first novel, Bowl of Cherries, was published when Kaufman was ninety years old.

"I had never written a novel until last year," the author noted in an interview with Marc Weingarten on the LA Weekly Web site. "I wouldn't have done it if the circumstances hadn't existed in which it became increasingly difficult for a person to write a picture if that person was over, say, 40 years of age." While the author has said that writing a novel is not nearly as romantic as he thought it would be, he does find benefits in novel writing that screenplay writing doesn't offer. "Over so much of my life I've been limited by writing for pictures," the author told Connor Kilpatrick in an interview on the New York Magazine Web site. "There's certain things you can't say, certain things you can't show. In the book I found I had much greater freedom than when I was writing for pictures."

Weingarten called Bowl of Cherries "a social satire of the first order." Jason Kuiper, writing in the Omaha World-Herald, referred to the novel as "a whacked-out picaresque, a coming-of-age tale and a meditation on our current state of affairs along with mankind's long affair with warfare."

The story revolves around Judd Breslau, a fourteen-year-old who falls in with an Egyptologist after being abandoned by his parents who get him into Yale University, even though he isn't qualified. Breslau is quickly kicked out of school and meets Phillips Chatterton, an Egyptologist who offers him a place to stay if Breslau will help him with his research that he conducts out of his dilapidated home laboratory. The research involves Chatterton's crackpot theory about the pyramids and sound waves. Breslau decides to accept the offer only because he is attracted to Chatterton's young daughter, Valerie, who ultimately leads Breslau away from his research and off on an adventure that takes the young Breslau to a Colorado equestrian ranch, a porn studio beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and ultimately a jail cell in southern Iraq, where the novel opens to find Breslau is being held for execution in Assama prison. The town is called Coproliabad and everything in the place is made of recycled human excrement, which is transformed into a type of concrete by mixing it with sand, shale, and an agglutinate.

In a review that appeared in the Washington Post, Ron Charles noted that "the weird incongruity between highbrow/lowbrow humor is only part of what makes Bowl of Cherries so irresistible. Kaufman's comic imagination, his ability to mix things scatological and historical, political and philosophical, reminds one of those young'uns Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. The ridiculous slapstick in Assama is straight from Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water, and a cameo appearance by a goofy President Bush will take you back to Dr. Strangelove. But Kaufman seems to have more heart than those '60s satirists; his precocious young hero pulls on our sympathies even as he trudges on through absurdity."

Kaufman is a veteran of World War II and of the campaign to win Guadalcanal. He was also among the troops that landed at Guam and Okinawa. Several reviewers noted that many would expect a man of Kaufman's age to write about the past and not modern life, society, and war. When asked why he decided to write about the Iraq War, the author told Teddy Wayne in an interview on the Radar Web site: "There's so many young kids getting killed, which disturbs me, because I remember people getting killed very close to me in the war I was in." The author added later in the interview: "It's certainly something you think about every once in a while."

Bowl of Cherries received widespread favorable reviews from the critics. "This debut novel is the work of a real storyteller: a tremendous farce and a tale of true love that charts a crazily inventive route between start and finish, told in an over-the-top prose style that is as intoxicating as it is ornate," wrote Rodney Welch on Rodney Welch: The Blog. Calling the author "a hell of a writer" in a review on the KQED Web site, Suzanne Kleid added: "If the world is fair, Bowl of Cherries will go down as one of the great satiric treatments of the current ongoing conflict" [in Iraq.]

Many reviewers made special note of the author's humor. "Judd's arcane vocabulary sounds suspiciously more like a word-drunk nonagenarian's than a teenager's, but the writing is still a hoot," noted John Lingan in a review on the City Paper Online. "The descriptions of Judd's troubled upbringing … and the world of higher education … are as gorgeously blooming as his carnal adventures are funny. The novel is too long and its cast of calculating entrepreneurs too large, but it is a knowing satire of the American lust for recognition at any cost, and here is where Kaufman's résumé resonates."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of Bowl of Cherries, p. 31.

Book World, September 23, 2007, Ron Charles, "Blind Ambition: A Modern-Day Satire from the 90-Year-Old Creator of Mr. Magoo," p. 6.

Current Biography, January, 2008, Claire Stanford, "Millard Kaufman, Screenwriter and Novelist," p. 42.

Entertainment Weekly, October 5, 2007, Adam B. Vary, review of Bowl of Cherries, p. 74.

Interview, October, 2007, Stephen Dougherty, "Millard Kaufman: The Man Who Shows It's Never Too Late to Try Something," p. 102.

Library Journal, October 1, 2007, Stephen Morrow, review of Bowl of Cherries, p. 61.

Los Angeles Magazine, July, 1999, "Book Pick," p. 26.

New Yorker, September 17, 2007, Rebecca Mead, "First at Ninety," p. 36.

Omaha World-Herald, October 7, 2007, Jason Kuiper, "Book Review: ‘Bowl of Cherries’ Takes Wacky Road to Iraq."

Publishers Weekly, April 19, 1999, review of Plots and Characters: A Screenwriter on Screenwriting, p. 56; August 22, 2007, Craig Morgan Teicher, "A Second Career at 90: PW Talks to Millard Kaufman"; August 27, 2007, review of Bowl of Cherries, p. 60.

Washington Post, September 23, 2007, Ron Charles, "Blind Ambition: A Modern-Day Satire from the 90-year-old Creator of Mr. Magoo," p. BW06.

ONLINE

BBC Web site,http://www.bbc.co.uk/ (October 11, 2007), Chris Power, "Kaufmann Finally Pops His Literary Cherry."

City Paper Online,http://www.citypaper.com/ (December 26, 2007), John Lingan "Never Too Late; At 90, Baltimore Native Millard Kaufman Finally Gets Around to Writing His Ribald First Novel.

KQED Web site,http://www.kqed.org/ (September 24, 2007), Suzanne Kleid, review of Bowl of Cherries.

LA Weekly,http://www.laweekly.com/ (October 17, 2007), Marc Weingarten, "Millard Kaufman's Life and His Bowl of Cherries. The Nonagenarian Novel."

New York Magazine Web site,http://nymag.com/ (May 5, 2008), Connor Kilpatrick, "Millard Kaufman on Being a First-Time Novelist at 90."

Paste Magazine,http://www.pastemagazine.com/ (December 3, 2007), Mary Richardson, review of Bowl of Cherries.

Radar,http://www.radaronline.com/ (May 5, 2008), Teddy Wayne, "Antique Roadshow. Millard Kaufman Is Not Your Average 90-Year-Old Debut Novelist."

Rocky Mountain Chronicle,http://www.rmchronicle.com/ (September 18, 2007), Evan P. Schneider, "Never Roll Over," profile of author.

Rodney Welch: The Blog,http://rodneywelch.blogspot.com/ (December 7, 2007), Rodney Welch, "Chimerical Crapshoot," review of Bowl of Cherries.