"The Private Lives of Pippa Lee."

[CHRIS B]

The Miller's Tale - Rebecca Miller interview

Aidan Smith persuades the multi-talented but notoriously private Rebecca Miller to open the book just a little on life with her film star husband Daniel Day-Lewis, and her playwright father Arthur
Photograph: Fran VealeDANIEL DAY-LEWIS has done it again. Few thought he could better Gangs Of New York, but with There Will Be Blood he's raised the bar for intensity of performance. And I'm not talking about his acting.

The much-decorated star is in a class of his own as a wife-thanker. Collecting his 2003 Best Actor Bafta for Gangs, he gazed down at the woman with the fine-boned face framed by the pre-Raphaelite curls in the seat next to the one he'd just vacated and said: "There are so many things I could say but what I am going to say is that you are simply the best sport I've ever met in my life."

This year, with the TV cameras pre-programmed to capture the blush in full, he insisted that the Bafta for Blood would not have been winnable without the assistance of "Sergeant-Major Miller". And a few weeks later at the Oscars, he addressed his better half by what we might assume he regards as her full and proper name – "the enchantingly optimistic, open-minded, beautiful, Rebecca Miller."

She sounds quite a woman, does Miller, but can you really be a sergeant-major and enchantingly anything at the same time? Assuming they are different versions of the same person, I am hoping to meet the latter in London today but am concerned that the former might show up. Miller is not known for being quite so gushy about the men in her life – either Day-Lewis or her late father, the playwright Arthur Miller.

She has a career of her own as both a film director and a writer and, perfectly understandably, would prefer to talk about that. This can cause frustration and provoke bitchiness, with the author of a Vogue profile feeling moved to complain: "She's Arthur Miller's daughter and Daniel Day-Lewis' wife, for God's sake. Why else are we here?"

In previous interviews, polite but firm warnings were issued – no, she wouldn't talk about these two colossi in her life. Then, presumably when she tired of this, Sergeant-Major Miller started delegating. I get my order to this effect from the PR.

But the welcome is friendly. In her hotel bar, Miller is dressed in cardigan, jeans and boots which are definitely more enchanting than army-issue. This encourages me to begin by asking if she's been to any great parties recently and she laughs – in an accent that's firmly Brooklyn, just like her old man's.

For Gangs, she says, the Baftas were "cool". But this year, with more pressure on the bridesmaid event because of a threat to the Oscars, the atmosphere was "fraught". "The moment-to-moment of these things isn't as much fun as you might think," says Miller, "though it's really nice when someone you know is singled out and appreciated."

Miller is very happy that that someone is Day-Lewis and not her, even though she used to be an actress and presumably sought the same approbation. She starred in the lesser works of good directors such as Mike Nichols and Alan Pakula and maybe her better-known films were Regarding Henry with Harrison Ford and Consenting Adults alongside Kevin Spacey. But she insists she was only using acting to learn about directing.

"Thank God my movies were flops," she says. "If I had become a movie star that would have been a personal disaster. Friends wondered what the hell I was doing at that time because acting seemed so out of character. But I knew I wasn't suited to it. I don't like my face being the focus."

Miller was born in 1962, the year Marilyn Monroe, her father's second wife, died. Her mother was the photographer Inge Morath, who became the third Mrs Miller after meeting Arthur on the set of The Misfits, Monroe's final film, which he'd scripted.

Before acting, Miller tried painting. Was she deliberately avoiding becoming a writer? "It's possible. But I wrote a lot when I was younger. It seems odd, given I've always written, that I didn't try to get published until I was married and had started a family." I attempt some (well-intentioned) flattery and tell her she was brave to risk comparison with the author of Death Of A Salesman, The Crucible and A View From The Bridge, whereupon she reverts to sergeant-major mode again. "Maybe this is hard for you to digest but I wasn't scared of the reaction I'd get, and I'm still not."

Miller has mislaid those early attempts at fiction but they were "very extreme, very violent". As a child she was obsessed with the devil and, as a college student, would have to complete mundane tasks within an allotted time or else risk dying before she was 36. She adds: "It didn't even occur to me that those stories would be disturbing to read. I think I write with a kind of blindness about expectation and, to me, that's a handy thing."

So what does Miller write about now she's finally in print? In the short story collection Personal Velocity and the scripts for the films Angela, Proof and The Ballad Of Jack And Rose – the latter being Day-Lewis directed by Miller – there's usually been a father and, also, a daughter. Sometimes the girl struggles to emerge from the man's shadow; other times she worries about him dying (Miller's father was 46 when she was born). Now comes her first novel The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee in which the heroine is married to a publishing giant – "the virile champion of the Great American novel" – who's 30 years her senior and fading fast.This might seem a wacky notion, I say, but there seems to something of a theme here. Miller smiles tensely, insists her work has always been personal, and eventually offers up the odd crumb from the family table.

Her first memory of her childhood in rural Connecticut was of running into a cluster of butterflies and, because she was wearing a butterfly-patterned dress, of thinking she'd "just disappeared – it was euphoric". But she cannot remember the first time she realised her father was famous.

That Arthur Miller was a "shadow person", she says, though she does describe her family as being "like a circus". Was it glamorous? "Well, only if you consider being surrounded by intellectuals glamorous. It wasn't materialistic and it wasn't about money. In many ways it was quite spartan. If a coffee pot broke, you glued it back together."

In a house full of books she read everything – "from Tolstoy to Fear Of Flying." Did her father read her first scribbles? "Yes, but it wasn't like he got under my car to fix the oil. I learned more by example." Her favourite line of his comes from Death Of A Salesman – "Wonderful coffee… meal in itself." All the more so, presumably, when poured from a cracked pot.

The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee is very good, and very John Updike in its suburban set-up, before the sex 'n' drugs 'n' fear of death kick in – and so doesn't really need the help of fame-by-association. And before it hits the shelves, an impossibly starry cast has signed up for the film version, including Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Robin Wright Penn, Monica Bellucci and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Miller will direct in New York, where she and Day-Lewis live part of the year, the rest being geared round the schooling of their two young sons in Co Wicklow in Ireland.

Would she like to make another film with her husband? "Of course". What's it like living with an actor who, legend has it, self-mutates into his characters? "You'll have to ask him." Rebecca Miller, after a few false starts, has found her voice but saves the best of it for her writing. "I've got this three-hour window after picking up the boys and I get so lost in my writing that I forget to take off my coat." She adds that her desk is entirely surrounded by an imposing moat of books, but I think I might have been able to guess that.

• The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee (Canongate) is published on April 3, price £9.99

http://scotlandonsunday.s...-Tale--Rebecca.3904797.jp

[CHRIS B]

This is good news! I love Maria Bello!!

Bello steps in for Gyllenhaal on film

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Maria Bello is in final negotiations to take over for Maggie Gyllenhaal in Rebecca Miller's adaptation of her novel "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee."

Gyllenhaal had hoped to complete her portion in the ensemble cast within two weeks in Connecticut, playing star Robin Wright Penn's mother in several flashback sequences. But when the new scheduling stretched out her shoot over five weeks, she chose to stay with Peter Sarsgaard and their newborn as he films "An Education" in the U.K.

The departure was amicable, given her close friendship with co-star Julianne Moore and the producers, who also made her acclaimed indie "SherryBaby." Gyllenhaal is considering other screen roles in the coming weeks.

Her loss is a gain for Bello ("Thank You for Smoking"), who happens to bear a closer resemblance to the lead actress. The film centers on the title character (Wright Penn), whose life begins to unravel after her husband leaves her.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

http://www.reuters.com/ar...ews/idUSN2834985320080328

[CHRIS B]

A detailed description of "Pippa Lee."

Warning: there might be spoilers in the article.

Sex, drugs and loss: many layers of a life
Aine O'Connor applauds a novel that shows how our lives are built up of layers whereby a passive public image conceals disquieting truths

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Rebecca Miller

Canongate, €15

FOR more than half of her life Pippa Lee has been a devoted wife to Herb, who, upon the onset of ill-health and his 80th birthday, suggests they move to a retirement community.

Long the perfect accompaniment to Herb's achievements, Pippa is attractive, kind, admired and provider of excellent children, meals and entertainment.

While she enjoys the liberation brought on by downsizing and shedding baggage, Pippa finds it also creates a gap that tips the carefully crafted balance of her life. At 50, she is years younger than most of her new neighbours, yet like them in a place that no matter how jaunty cannot hide its subtext of Last Stop Before Death. Many years before, she had buried her doubts and thrown herself into becoming the perfect wife and mother, not Stepford, but a supporting character in the lives of her husband and children as opposed to the star of her own.

Now, with more time, fewer responsibilities and a permanent reminder of finality, Pippa's acceptance wobbles and a long -buried part of her starts to manifest.

The part of Pippa that allowed her to mould to her role, also allows her to surf the change, she is bewildered but not thrown, questioning but not undermined, although she does wonder if she might be having a quiet little nervous breakdown. Pippa's success has long been, and will continue to be, her ability to allow events to happen.

A film version is already well underway with Miller scheduled to direct a star-studded cast that includes Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder, Robyn Wright Penn and Keanu Reeves. The blurb for the film reveals a plot fact I almost considered a twist in the book. It's a shift of emphasis perhaps deemed vital in film-making, but one that goes unmentioned in the blurb for the book, and indeed it is a mark of the novel's strength that it remains so readable without any hint of twist or upcoming surprise.

There are stories where a twist or secret is so hinted at that the reader becomes impatient and the twist becomes a shadow.

However Pippa is a likable, clever, knowing character with whom I was quite happy to travel knowing that the story was leading somewhere, without any panic to find out exactly where.

The story of Pippa's new life intertwines with the history that got her there, the weres and could-have-beens that she chose to reject when she chose her life with Herb. People, addictions, behaviours, events that Pippa elected to leave behind or eradicate from her conscience when she picked what she deemed the best option. The secret lives of Pippa Lee, which prove that what on the surface seems like a rather passive life, required great strength and effort of will.

As the title suggests, this is a novel about the many layers of a life. And while Pippa's is wealthier and more glamorous than the average housewife's, the moral is the same, you never know how, or what it takes, for anyone to fulfil their public role.

Pippa the role is written in third person via a narrator, while the real Pippa is written in first person (although as events unfold this technique forces the reader to consider where the line between real and assumed personalities lies). Miller's prose is always sharp and visual without being overly descriptive. All of the descriptions, whether of people, places or emotions manage to be both prosaic and evocative.

Indeed, everything is treated prosaically -- sex, drugs, fidelity, infidelity, loss -- everything is treated as a simple fact, there and to be dealt with, for this is how Pippa is. We also learn why she is like that.

In many respects, this is a novel about choice, how we can choose to live and how we can choose to interpret the things that happen to us, whether we see hindrance or opportunity, setback or crisis, failure or success. It's also about the continuing nature of life, that it really isn't over til the fat lady sings.

Although it had come to a natural and perfectly timed conclusion, I could happily have read much more about Pippa Lee and her secret lives.

- Aine O'Connor

http://www.independent.ie...rs-of-a-life-1332205.html

[CHRIS B]

Tuesday, April 01, 2008
#22 - The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee
I've been banging on about Rebecca Miller for days now, ever since I started reading her new novel, which is coming out in August, for work. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee tells the story of a woman, the protagonist of the book's title, who marries a much older man, Herb, and starts a new life with him. Of all of my favourite things about this novel (and that list is endless), the fact that the narrative is so utterly surprising and goes in places you absolutely would not suspect endlessly impressed me as I read.

Here are 2 things that happened to me on my journey with Pippa Lee: I read in the elevator. Yes, I realize it's silly as I'm only on the 20th floor, but that's at least 2-3 minutes, which can be pages. I not only missed my floor but didn't notice the elevator was heading down instead of up before I realized I forgot to get off. "Oh well," I thought, and kept on reading. The VERY SAME day, I almost missed my subway stop and barely made it out of the doors before they crushed me in an iron grip, brushed myself off, and continued to read as I walked up the stairs and out on to Lansdowne. The book is that engrossing and entertaining.

It's just my kind of novel: swift, smart, acerbic, completely unpredictable and kind of kooky. I love Pippa. She's adventurous and damaged, a mythical combination, and I didn't want it to end.

Here's an interview with the author, Rebecca Miller. She rocks. She's talking about the filmed adaptation of the book coming out in 2009 starring Robin Wright Penn:

http://tragicrighthip.blo...e-lives-of-pippa-lee.html

[CHRIS B]

Danbury council approves 'Pippa Lee' agreement
Article Last Updated: 04/02/2008 08:34:51 AM EDT


DANBURY -- The Common Council last night gave permission to "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" to use the former Immanuel Lutheran School on Foster Street as production headquarters for the movie.
The production company has been in the building for a few weeks, as the city gave them temporary permission before granting formal permission at last night's Common Council meeting.

The production will pay the city $2,000 a month for using the main floor of the building, according to a letter on file from the city's corporation counsel.

The production crew is expected to use the building until June.

"Pippa Lee" is an independent film written and directed by Rebecca Miller of Roxbury, daughter of the late writer Arthur Miller.

The movie's all-star cast includes Keanu Reeves, Monica Bellucci and Winona Ryder.

The production's use of the building will not impact a renovation project scheduled to start there in July, city officials said.


-- From staff writer Eugene Driscoll

http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_8781082

[CHRIS B]

First Book review from the UK.

The case of the disintegrating girl

Rebecca Miller's study of an alienated life in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a model of detached observation, says Olivia Laing
Sunday April 6, 2008
The Observer

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
by Rebecca Miller
Canongate £9.99, pp233
So far, Rebecca Miller has written and directed Personal Velocity (originally her collection of short stories) and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is already in pre-production, with Robin Wright Penn signed up for the title role. Like The Ballad of Jack and Rose, this delicate, dreamy novel tells the story of an outsider for whom the ties of blood and marriage are both trap and salvation. As the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis and the daughter of Arthur Miller, it's no doubt a paradox with which Miller is exquisitely familiar.

A refugee from a troubled childhood, Pippa has nestled into the shade cast by her mighty husband, Herb, last of the great American publishers and her senior by 30 years. There she apparently flourishes, lulled by her role as helpmeet, thrower of dinner parties, charmer of writers, purveyor of endless plates of butterflied lamb. To be judged according to how well she succeeds in the drag act of bourgeois wife allows her to dodge, at least temporarily, the duty of discovering her own identity.
This simulacrum of Stepford wifehood (as the novel opens, Pippa and Herb have abandoned New York's Gramercy Park for a retirement community nicknamed Wrinkle Village) is already cracking. For Herb, the move is 'a sort of pre-emptive strike against decrepitude', but it sets his wife teetering on the edge of a breakdown that may in fact be a breakthrough or break-out for her long-concealed self. At night a different Pippa emerges; sleepwalking, she feasts on peanut butter and leaves a mess of eggs to congeal on the gleaming surface of her kitchen table. This slumbering creature with her alarming appetites horrifies the polished, glossy woman who appears by day. Caught on camera she appears 'inhuman'; none the less she is the repository of the real Pippa Lee.

Despite the drama of her midnight escapades, Pippa is a character notably lacking in definition, her misery a languorously blurred affair. It takes a switch from the third person to the first for her to shoot into focus, grasping hold of the narrative and rediscovering her past in a sensuous, kaleidoscopic rush that starts with her birth ('I emerged from Suky's womb fulsome and alert, fat as a six-month-old and covered in fine, black fur') and careens through to the snowy day she, Herb and their twins became 'a unit apart from the world'.

It's a journey (revealed via such modishly titled chapters as 'And Another Thing' and 'Aha!') that sees Pippa reel from intense childhood symbiosis with her red-haired, Dexedrine-addicted mother to her own speed-freak years in New York, via such lesser frequented junctions on the highway of teen rebellion as starring in an S&M film with her aunt's lesbian lover. The more wild and unhinged from any sort of responsibility or routine she grows, the more dissociated her voice becomes: a narcotic deadpan that glides over the terrible ends that await her mother and Herb's second wife with a boneless, near-sinister grace.

As an index of damage - inflicted by a smothering mother who was still bottle-feeding Pippa when she was 16 years old - this is both accurate and disturbing. It is not until the narrative returns to the present that Pippa slides from vital to vapid. The double hammer blow of losses she suffers in the final pages is shrugged off so swiftly its effect is barely registered before being co-opted as the prod needed for Pippa to escape her stunted marital life. 'I try to remember my other life, the one I left, but it is evaporating from my mind,' she explains in one last breathless monologue, delivered, in an apparent attack of amnesia, on the very day of leaving. 'I can remember images - Herb, the house in Marigold Village, my favourite vegetable knife - but they are bloodless and unreal ... I feel an unfamiliar story unfurling in me ... I am filled with joy and happiness.' Though clearly meant to deliver the exhilaration of a woman restored to herself, it's Pippa who seems bloodless and somnambulant, a sleepwalker to the last.

If the flatness of tone diminishes emotional sympathy, it does at least preserve the world in which Pippa moves with frosty clarity. Miller is a luminous writer and the visual impact of her sentences carry something of the cool impersonality of an Edward Hopper painting. Strange images linger: a glass house, a wounded fawn, a gun dangling 'like the droopy head of a fading flower'. But Pippa is too vacant to bear the emotional scrutiny to which Miller subjects her. It remains to be seen how film fleshes her out; in the meantime, gazing into these multiple private Pippas is like opening a series of Russian dolls, each intricately wrought, self-contained and self-revealing, and each just as empty as the last.

[CHRIS B]

And another:

Life outside parenthood
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 06/04/2008

Ophelia Field reviews The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller

Five pages into this novel, a character described as 'probably the finest fiction writer' in America delivers a tribute to its eponymous central figure, declaring Pippa Lee to be 'a mystery, a cipher, something which is nearly extinct these days: a person not controlled by ambition or greed or a crass need for attention, but by a desire to experience life completely, and to make life a little easier for the people around her'.

Pippa's adult daughter, Grace, however, sees her mother as merely a doormat, devoid of love for her. The reader is challenged to reconcile these two characterisations.

advertisementThe first part of the book, set following the move of the 50-something Pippa and her elderly husband, Herb, to a retirement community in Connecticut, is written in the third person, while part two, describing Pippa's life before her marriage, is told by Pippa herself.

The shift signifies a move into her 'private' past and implies that her post-Herb life has been a long coma of bourgeois detachment from her true self.

At one point, Herb describes a novel he is reading as 'lowbrow for highbrows', and Rebecca Miller's own novel might similarly be called 'middlebrow for highbrows'. Her sentences are often handsome, based on a wryly observant eye and emotional wisdom, as when she says of Pippa that, 'It was so lonely, knowing things about her children that they no longer remembered'.

Yet the book's subject - the gaping ignorance most of us have about our parents as individuals independent of parenthood, and how that ignorance feeds cycles of misplaced rebellion - seems unambitious and slightly pop-Freudian.

Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections without the bitterness, mixed with Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides minus the eccentricity, this novel is a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read.

It is written, however, with an awareness not unnatural, perhaps, in Arthur Miller's daughter (and Daniel Day-Lewis's wife) that it is a smaller thing than the novels of what the author herself describes as that 'bigger, Titanic, preneurotic period in American literary life, when people drank Scotch with dinner and wrote unapologetic sentences and ruined each other's lives unconsciously, with the ignorance of children...'
 

 

[CHRIS B]

Lumina Films changes name to Salt Co.
By Stuart Kemp

April 6, 2008

LONDON -- Movie sales, production and finance banner Lumina Films is changing its name to the Salt Co. and repositioning itself to concentrate on a more diverse slate of projects.

Previously known for its activities with Latin American projects, Lumina's new look and name aims to "better reflect the full range of services that the company is able to offer the international filmmaking community."

Salt, part of the International Film Collective group of companies, is headed by Lumina's Samantha Horley as managing director, with Horley's biz partners Robert Bevan and Cyril Megret continuing as directors.

"The re-positioning will help us to build on our international credentials as a U.K.-based sales operation whilst bringing into focus the packaging and financing services that we are able to offer: the extra flavor we can add," Horley said.

Horley told The Hollywood Reporter that Salt's ambitions lie in focusing on putting together packages, financing and sales plans for projects that "are honest and realistic."
 

"We have good relationships with U.S. hedge funds, equity players and investors and we want to offer a place for filmmakers to come for minimum guarantees that are at a realistic level," she said.

Horley added that the company will look to get involved in projects at as early a stage as possible.

Horley and company recently put together Rebecca Miller's "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" with a cast including Robin Wright Penn, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Monica Bellucci, Julianne Moore, Maria Bello and Alan Arkin.

The trio holds this project up as being an example of the type of project Salt will want to have on its slate

http://www.hollywoodrepor...977ef683e5cf7c062dd94e7b1

[CHRIS B]

'Salt Co.' the production company for "Pippa Lee" has updated their webpage and cast list. There is a new a cast memeber, someone named Blake Lively. She will be playing young Pippa.

http://www.salt-co.com/mi...s/pippalee/pippa_lee.html


Blake Lively

[CHRIS B]

No big news or anything... it's actually kind of stupid! But I asked the producer of the film about Winona's name in "Pippa Lee." In the book her name was Moira and IMDB says her name is Sandra! So, I asked about that and here's what they said:

Dear Chris,

Yes, the name has changed from book to screenplay. That is the only
information that I can give you right now.

Best,

Cleo

I just wonder why only Winona's character name was changed! Eveyone else's remained the same.

[CHRIS B]

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller

Synopsis from the back of the book;-

Meet Pippa Lee, a thoroughly modern heroine.

She is the devoted wife and mother of a brilliant man thirty years her senior, proud mother of grown up twins, and an adored friend and neighbour. But when once she was content with this seemingly enviable world, Pippa finds her life beginning to unravel. Amid the lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder, how did she find herself in this place?

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs, betrayals and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly captures the challenges, confusion and excitement of modern life - and all the possibility that it holds.

This book starts seemingly as a safe predictable read about a middle aged woman and her much older husband moving into a retirement community. However it soon changes changes into something entirely different when we are taken back to Pippa’s dysfuntional childhood and teenage years. It then appears to go down into the sado masochistic and drug scene for a while. When Pippa starts a relationship with Herb Lee 30 years her senior who ultimately becomes her husband, a truly shocking event seems to trigger a period of domestic harmony and a perfectly behaved Pippa for the next 20 years or so.
In the third part of the book yet more unexpected things happen. Pippa befriends the strange son of her new friend who is portayed as an almost supernatural god -like being especially during one intimate scene which some readers might find offensive.
I enjoyed reading this book and liked Pippa Lee especially when she behaves like the perfect housewife on the outside but has rebellious thoughts all cooped up inside.
The author writes well in my opinion and I would definitely pick up another of her books.

[CHRIS B]

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, by Rebecca Miller

From minx to mom: the mistress of all makeovers
Friday, 18 April 2008


Rebecca Miller's debut novel tells the story of a woman divided against herself. Emerging from a family tradition of smother love, Pippa Lee is pacified with a baby's bottle until the age of 12. When she discovers her doting mother's addiction to amphetamine, she's transformed into a furious teenager. Heedless and hapless, she drops out of school, leaves home and embraces a life of dissipation, casual treachery and substance abuse. She is Pippa the destroyer, an "ingénue femme fatale" who takes no responsibility for the lives she wrecks, including that of her kind Aunt Trish, whose girlfriend she steals.


She is rescued by Herb Lee, an urbane and charismatic New York publisher, 30 years her senior and very rich. He loves her because she's an "original" and can give him back his youth. Surprisingly, Pippa loves him in return. "I always knew you were no good," wails Herb's wife, "a predator of the worst kind, the unconscious kind." Not even Gigi's suicide can taint their happiness, and Pippa sets about training herself to be good. So begins her second transformation into the perfect wife, mother and cook.

The novel opens as Herb, now 80, has liquified his assets to secure the saintly Pippa's future. The couple have moved into a retirement community for the filthy rich. They're entertaining Herb's literary friends, and we find Pippa in her immaculate kitchen, "lighting a small blowtorch and turning it on 15 pots of crème brulée". No wonder she's sleepwalking.

Beloved by all, yet never quite at home in Herb's hyper-civilised milieu, she befriends the damaged Chris, a failed born-again Christian. Meanwhile, her sleepwalking (and driving) allows Pippa to surrender the control she has longed to lose, and regress into night-time binges of chocolate cake and chain-smoking.

Rebecca Miller is the daughter of Arthur Miller and the wife of Daniel Day Lewis, though her writing requires no external supports. She's at her best in the central section, a first-person narrative wherein Pippa recounts the bizarre events of her youth. The seduction of her high-school teacher is startling, painful and told with great sensitivity, and Mr Brown is a beautifully realised creation. There's an episodic quality here that hints at Miller's background in short stories. Vivacious and intense, these chapters are bound by a consistency of tone and voice lacking in some of the third-person sections. The novel's beginning, in particular, feels strained.

Her psychology is often penetrating, especially about the mother-daughter bond, "a deadly sweet and voracious passion". The writing is rich in striking images. A glance is "like a magpie spotting a rhinestone". The nests of brown-tail moths look like "cotton candy with worms in it".

The conclusion is a pile-up of calamities, though not without the obligatory reconciliations and epiphanies. There's even a promise of liberation for Pippa, who hitches a ride in Chris's van and, like so many other characters in American fiction, heads west towards an empty horizon

[CHRIS B]

Winona starts filming her scenes this week! I heard she will shoot from now until the end of May!! Also, someone on IMDB said th ey spotted her shopping at the Danbury Mall. I hope some set pictures show up soon!

[CHRIS B]

Here is the cover shot of the US edition! I was surprised to see that this one is completely different from the UK version.



Oh yeah, the novel comes out August 5th 2008!

[CHRIS B]

Winona is shooting in New Milford again. If anyone remembers she shot "Mr. Deeds" there as well! And I could've been there too. I drove through that town the day she was filming... oh well.

Movie shoot moves to New Milford

BY CHRIS GARDNER REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN 
Actor Keanu Reeves with Jillian Alps, general manager of the Heritage Inn in New Milford. 

NEW MILFORD -- At least for one day, Jillian Alps felt like a star.

The general manager of the Heritage Inn on Bridge Street played hostess to film stars Keanu Reeves, Alan Arkin, Winona Ryder and Robin Wright Penn on Monday when scenes from the movie "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" were filmed in town.

The film crew rented four of the property's 20 guest rooms for the day so the actors and actresses could relax between takes. All gave autographs and were gracious with the staff, said Alps, who couldn't pass up getting her picture taken with Reeves.

"He was more than happy to sit down with us," she said, describing him as "easy going," "low key" and a "nice guy." "As soon as they walked in the door they shook hands. We had breakfast waiting."

It was the second time the bed and breakfast, a former tobacco warehouse and feed and grain store listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has hosted a movie crew. Last year producers and actors with "The Six Wives of Henry Lefay" stayed at the property during shooting in town.

"I believe it is great exposure for the town of New Milford since we are sometimes thought of as the gateway to the Litchfield Hills area," Alps said.

The movie, directed by Rebecca Miller, daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller of Roxbury, is being shot in several locations in western Connecticut, including Heritage Village in Southbury and Danbury, where the crew is using a former school as its production headquarters and for storage.

The crew was going to shoot an office scene at the Heritage Inn, but decided to film in a more traditional office building, Alps said.

That didn't disappoint anyone at the bed and breakfast, she said. Arkin bought a cake to celebrate the birthday of Lola Belsito, the film's production supervisor, and employees were invited to join in the celebration.

Alps said Reeves, Ryder and Penn signed autographs and handed out photographs.
Scenes for the movie are scheduled to be shot in the next couple of weeks in and around a condominium in the vicinity of Grove Pond Lane off Krueger Circle in Heritage Village. The film is partially set in a retirement community much like the village, and tells the story of a woman who carves out a new identity after her husband leaves her.

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