Radical Wolfe
Writer: Michael Lewis
Director: Richard Dewey
Release: October 31, 2023
Producer(s): Richard Dewey, Andy Fortenbacher, Chris Laszlo
Executive Producer(s): Nathan Epstein, David Light, Gerry Ohrstrom
Music by: Alex Mansour and Luke Schwartz
Genre(s): Documentary, Biography, Communication, History
ID: tt28308341
Runtime: 76 minutes
Based On: Based on the life and work of Tom Wolfe (and an article by Michael Lewis)
Synopsis: RADICAL WOLFE is the first feature film to explore Tom Wolfe’s life and work, a man who pioneered disruptive journalism, challenged American obsessions and overused punctuation way before it was cool. Tom didn’t just document America, he dipped his pen in acid and took readers on a vivid trip through the summer of love, landing on the moon and 1980s Wall Street money-grubbing.
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Quiet Literary Giant Gets Attention He Deserves in Radical Wolfe
Quotes and Lines
“controversial…cynical…devastating…outlandish…mean…”
“…imperfect role model” Michael Lewis
“…the truth is always revolutionary…” – Tom Wolfe
“I think if you started to get a little famous as a writer in the late ‘60s, early 70s in the United States, you had some obligation to be a character. You could be outrageous like Hunter Thompson, You could be pseudo Englishman like William F. Buckley. You could stab your wife like Norman Mailer. And the white suit enabled people to think of him as this great, unusual character.” – Michael Lewis
“He called his use of punctuation a process of violating the Geneva Conventions of the mind. He wanted to approximate what it felt like to be thinking.” Emily Witt, writer, The New Yorker
“He said, ‘Well, you’re nobody until somebody hates you.’” – Alexandra Wolfe
“The process of writing, which some people describe as a joy has never been a joy to me. It’s agony, and it is like having arthritis. It hurts a little every day, and every day, when you wake up, it’s in the back of your mind that you’ve gotta put your feet in the stocks and make yourself sit there and turn out something.” Tom Wolfe
“But I tell you, literary spats are fun. It makes you realize you’re alive in the morning” – Tom Wolfe
“We just don’t have figures like that anymore. There are no journalists that huge anymore. What he did was just fundamentally different because of how grandiose he was.” – Ron Charles, WaPo Book Critic