expo63:expo63:Maurice (James Ivory) at 26, 1987 – 2013 [x]*****Favourite&n

expo63:expo63:Maurice (James Ivory) at 26, 1987 – 2013 [x]*****Favourite Maurice things, 6/26: James Ivory (1928–) & Ismail Merchant (1936–2005)Photography credits, clockwise from top:• Manhattan, New York City, 1975, by Mary Ellen Mark. [x]• Portrait by Lord Snowdon, vintage bromide print, 9 Feb 1983, from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. [x]• c. 1984, © Photofest. From Rodger Streitmatter (2013) Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). [x]Robert Emmet Long: Because you and Ismail have been such close partners for such a record number of years, do you ever feel as if you were half of a person?James Ivory: Not at all. I feel sometimes that we are the same person.James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies, by Robert Emmet Long (2005), p. 7.Merchant and Ivory first met in early 1961. By May, they had formed Merchant Ivory Productions. Until Ismail’s sudden death in 2005 they were long-term life partners. Their professional partnership as filmmakers entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest in independent movie history. Between 1961 and 2005 they made nearly 40 films, most of them (although not Maurice) scripted by the Booker Prize-winning novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013).• Jim and Ismail chose to make Maurice as their 25th Anniversary production (and 21st film together) immediately after their biggest international hit to date with A Room With A View. • They did this despite the greater difficulty of raising finance from their usual backers for an obviously gay film – based on a book which, in the mid-1980s, was still regarded by most critics as ‘a really terrible novel’ (Richard Roud, Guardian, 30 Jul 1987) – and resistance from the Trustees of E. M. Forster’s literary estate at King’s College, Cambridge, who thought a film of Maurice would ‘do the novelist’s reputation no good’. [x] • They deliberately set out to make Maurice as a gay love story with mainstream appeal which would ‘break away from the art-house mould to which such films are usually assigned’ [x]. ‘It’s done in a different way from other films about homosexuals – within the context of normal feelings as opposed to abnormal feelings,’ Merchant told American Vogue in May 1987. • And, of course, as almost certainly the first gay film with an affirmative happy ending. [x] Which gained in power and political force as Maurice reached audiences at the height of the AIDS crisis and during the introduction of Clause 28 in the UK.…and some more favourite pics (the top one especially) for @queenoftheimps. -- source link

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