Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge

by Paul Auster

From The New York Trilogy to The Book of Illusions , Paul Auster's novels have earned him a reputation as "one of American's most spectacularly inventive writers." Here, published together for the first time, are the screenplays of the three films he made in the 1990s.

Smoke (starring Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, and Stockard Channing) tells the story of a novelist, a cigar store manager, and a black teenager who unexpectedly cross paths and end up changing each other's lives in indelible ways.

Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Smoke directly inspired Blue in the Face , a largely improvised comedy shot in a total of six days. A film unlike any other it stars Harvey Keitel, with featured performances by Roseanne, Lily Tomlin, Lou Reed, and Michael J. Fox.

Lulu on the Bridge (Auster's solo directorial debut, again starring Harvey Keitel, with Mira Sorvino, Willem Dafoe, and Vanessa Redgrave) opens with the accidental shooting of jazz musician Izzy Maurer during a performance in a New York club. Izzy is then led on a journey into the strange and sometimes frightening labyrinth of his soul. Both thriller and fairy tale, Lulu on the Bridge is above all a story about the redemptive powers of love.

Genres: Fiction, Film

384 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.

Reviews

[RND · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smoke and Blue in the Face are some great films, but I remember not liking/enjoying Lulu on the Bridge. As I suspected, it seems to read better as a screenplay than as a film. It's difficult to weigh a book of three screenplays (well, just two, really, as BitF is largely improvised) when the quality varies. But Auster's a great writer, and provided are interesting behind-the-scenes stories of how the films were pulled off, as well as smaller amusing anecdotes from the set, and in the case of BitF, a very interesting look into how they executed a mostly-improv film, patching together different scenes and interstitials from two different shoots months apart.

[Demo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read Smoke, but I've enjoyed it.