In 2009, Taiwan-born Hollywood director Ang Lee (李安) made Taking Woodstock, a movie about American hippies in the 1960s and the Woodstock music festival in the summer of 1969. The film’s screenplay was written by longtime Lee collaborator James Schamus, adapted from a memoir by Elliot Tiber.
While the book was about a young gay Jewish man in his twenties who helped pull off the concert, Lee’s movie took some liberties with the story but nevertheless turned out a well-received film about those heady days.
Tiber has now written After Woodstock, a sequel that covers his adult life since the big concert up to the present day. And at the request of the publisher, Lee was kind enough to pen a 500-word foreword to the new book.
Photo Courtesy of square one publishers
Lee writes that his collaboration with Tiber came about after a chance encounter in a San Francisco television studio.
“I had just finished promoting my Chinese-language film Lust, Caution. On my way out [of the studio], I bumped into [the show’s] next guest... Elliot Tiber, then a very vigorous seventy-something, who cornered me and thrust a copy of his new book into my hands.”
“I am rather shy, and Elliot is a nonstop talker, and an extremely funny one, so I had no choice but to mumble something polite and take the book on my way to the airport,” Lee writes.
“Taking Woodstock came at exactly the right moment. It was full of light, love and laughs, a memoir about the last days of American innocence. And strangely enough, it also fit in with the movie I had just made: both were coming-of-age stories, a genre that I have continued to explore with Life of Pi and my current film project [Billy Flynn’s Long Halftime Walk].”
Could Elliot’s second memoir find an audience in translation with Taiwanese readers? Anthony Pomes, the New York publisher’s marketing director, said foreign rights are being shopped around worldwide and Taipei publishers are being queried, too.
“The book covers about 30 years of Elliot’s life, from 1969 to 1999, and with an epilogue that takes readers to present day,” Pomes said.
“A translation for Taipei is possible, and the foreword by Ang Lee might be a selling point in Taiwan. We shall see.”
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