Dear F_____,

The Testament of Mary was quite excellent, wasn't it? I think the engine or raison d'etre of that play was to make the familiar new. How do you tell the crucifixion story so that it can hit an audience with new significance and avoid all the Sunday school...

Dear D___,

I went to the book fair at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art a couple weeks ago, and in one of the many booths selling art books I found a book by David Robbins on comedy in art called Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy....

It's my 35th birthday, not that anyone should care. I'll spend the day acting in a film with my friend Jonah Hill (I play a sociopathic murderer). I remember learning about sociopaths in my high school sociology class taught by the great Mr. Roland. He could do more pull-ups than...

Dear D______,

9am, Los Angeles.

Hi, it's James. Not feeling so great. Just overwhelmed. I'm at my place in L.A., but I've just been around the world for this Oz press tour. Berlin, Tokyo, Daytona, Moscow, London, and back and forth between L.A. and N.Y.C. a few times, sometimes within...

Dear F_____,

As you know, I've been in New York working on a film. They arranged my schedule in a horrible way so that I worked for a day and a half and then had two weeks off. As you know, I've spent a bunch of those days going to...

Dear D______,

I have been busy as usual. I've been directing a low-budget film about Charles Bukowski's childhood. It is not based on his book Ham on Rye; we got the rights to one of Bukowski's biographies, and we're working from that. I think it's going to be pretty special....

This week I went to see The Place Beyond the Pines at the Arclight. It being a Monday, the theater wasn't packed, but it was not a bad crowd considering. Also, it's a damn long film for what it is: an earnest character study done in a realistic style with...

Dear D_____,

How are you? Busy? Have classes started? What are you teaching, and how? My new classes have started and they're good, more like continuations from last semester. I have an undergraduate creative writing class at UCLA that is not like a regular writing class; I have them do...

I am writing from Rome. I am in the Hotel _______, which is very nice, near the Via Veneto, the street made famous by La Dolce Vita and Mastroianni. The street is no longer as it was in that film back in the '60s (I think); it still has restaurants,...

Dear R___________,

I'm on a plane flying from New Orleans to Los Angeles, my weekly trip. I have to say I love this teaching thing. I guess I love the purity of the situation, the smaller, bite-sized egos instead of the huge...

Dear R _______,

I am on a plane in L.A. about to take off for Jackson, Mississippi via Atlanta. I have been going back and forth between Jackson and L.A. on my days off for four weeks now in order to teach. I am teaching both undergraduate and graduate...

Dear R_________,

I have been very busy. I don't know if I've been busier than usual, but a lot is going on. I am down near Jackson in Mississippi working on the Faulkner film. It's the largest movie I've yet directed, moneywise, but it also has more characters than...

Dear D______,

I'm on my way to Venice for the film festival; the film I made with Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers, is premiering there. I'm very excited for people to see it. I think the best way to describe it is the way Harmony always spoke about it before we...

Dear N_______________,

I had such a good time with you the other day, although I know things are a bit weird. When I invited you to the Whitney it was because I wanted to spend as much time with a friend as possible, but you know how I am --...

I was in New York for a week and saw a few things and read a few things that got me thinking about the ways different art forms use fantasy and reality. As summer closes, I thought I'd write a few pieces about these different relationships.

Part One is...

I spent the last few days in Europe and, of course, that was the time I was able to catch up on my Girls viewing as well as take in two dramatized incarnations of the American classic, The Great Gatsby: the theatrical reading/ performance of the book by the Elevator...

While most people might be waiting for Spiderman or The Dark Knight Rises to be the movie event of the summer, the one film I have been thinking about is Channing Tatum and Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike. There is more to this film than meets the eye. Of course the...

This is my last set of recommendations for summer reading. I have two very fun reads. The first, The Trouble With Normal, was written by my former professor at Yale, the great queer theorist Michael Warner, and the second is a book by Frederick Exley called A Fan's Notes that...

I know these posts about books are not as fun to read as posts about movies or television shows, because not as many people have read the books as have watched the shows and films. Films and shows are large nodes of shared experience; everyone is a critic when it...

It has been said that New York Magazine's Vulture blog doesn't leave any of my farts un-sniffed, meaning they write about anything I do or say. But sadly, the blogosphere seems to sniff only the farts that have to do with pop culture. If I lip synch to Carly Rae...