The Toronto International Film Festival® today announced a special screening of Shane Salerno’s Salinger. The documentary follows elusive author and literary legend J.D. Salinger, one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, who brought the world The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger will screen to Festival audiences on Thursday, September 5 at 8 p.m.
For more than 50 years, J.D. Salinger has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by lack of access and the recycling of inaccurate information. Thus, Salinger has largely remained an enigma to the public and media alike.
During the nine years in which Salinger was in production, filmmaker Shane Salerno interviewed hundreds of people the world over, many of whom had previously declined to go on the record about their relationship with the iconic author. Salerno's documentary offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbours, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were unknown even to his own family. Providing unparalleled access to never-before-published photographs, diaries, letters, legal records, and documents, Salinger paints a definitive portrait.
Salinger will screen at Scotiabank Theatre on Thursday, September 5 at 8 p.m. Tickets on sale now. Purchase Festival tickets online attiff.net/festival, by phone 416.599.TIFF or 1.888.599.8433, and in person at the Festival Box Office (and TIFF Members Box Office) located at 225 King St. West. The 38th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 5 to 15, 2013.
Toronto, the Reitman family (Ivan Reitman, Agi Mandel and Susan Michaels), The Daniels Corporation and RBC. For more information, visit tiff.net.
- Shane Salerno was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He received national acclaim for his documentary short Sundown: The Future of Children and Drugs (91), made while he was still a high-school senior. He immediately began his television career as an apprentice writer-director on NYPD Blue, and wrote for Steven Spielberg at the newly minted DreamWorks. His co-writing credits include Breakdown (97), Armageddon (98), Shaft(00), and Oliver Stone's Savages (12), which he also executive produced. Salinger (13) marks his return to documentary filmmaking. He is also the co-author, with David Shields, of the companion biography Salinger, published by Simon & Schuster.