Salter’s time in the film world is simultaneously glamorous and repellent, erotic and appalling. In Rome, he meets directors, movie stars, and their mistresses, and has an affair of his own; in New York, he explores the city with Robert Redford and enjoys the ambiguous pleasures of celebrity. (“When I went into restaurants with Redford,” he recalls, “eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well.”) In his recent Profile of Salter, “The Last Book,” Nick Paumgarten describes Salter’s disappointment with his film career.
Of sixteen screenplays, only four were produced. There had been travel, money, beguiling women and fascinating men, and entry into rooms that might otherwise have been closed to him: stories more for the dinner table than for the page. He considered all this time squandered.
Read the rest at The New Yorker