We Should Talk

Here’s what happens between the lines.A novel that takes you inside The Front Page, the daring play that premiered on Broadway in 1928 and its first film version of 1931. The play that Tennessee Williams said “took the corsets off the American theater” and the movie Pauline Kael called “the greatest newspaper comedy of them all.” Now the novel that evokes its timeless farce set in the darker undercurrents of the era, and amid all that a reconciliation romance — or would that be two or three? A story that hits like a hurricane in black and white.Hollywood mid March 1931, the Front Page filmmakers — and incorrigible raconteurs — have come together for the final cut, their conversation shifting in and out of the story they‘ve made that’s unfolding on the screen in front of them: Chicago’s biggest story’s about to break at the same time as a seasoned newspaperman and his fiancée are about to skip town for New York and a whole new life. Only his editor gets wind of their plans somehow and will stoop to anything to keep his ace reporter on the story and the paper.Here in all their vainglory are the hardboiled reporters of movie legend, the shady politicians and the demigods with the money who think they run the show. And when that big story breaks, as night deepens and all their dreams and plans begin to collide, the couple’s perfect escape becomes more improbable by the second.Here as novel is the play adapted as film from the glorious 1930s, a story as pertinent today as then, when movies were never more popular, glamorous or noir, when the times were gut-punching hard and not letting up, when the algorithm for newspapers was print hitting pavement, when readers would come running, read them and weep, insatiable for more.This is Richard Cooper’s first novel. Read more