Farran Smith Nehme - The utterly winning, wholly delightful, totally cinematic debut novel of young love, old movies, and an epic search for a long-lost silent film

Farran Smith Nehme, Missing Reels. Overlook Press, 2014.
excerpt


selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/


The utterly winning, wholly delightful, totally cinematic debut novel of young love, old movies, and an epic search for a long-lost silent film
New York in the late 1980s. Ceinwen Reilly has just moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and she’s never going back, minimum wage job (vintage store salesgirl) and shabby apartment (Avenue C walkup) be damned. Who cares about earthly matters when Ceinwen can spend her days and her nights at fading movie houses—and most of the time that’s left trying to look like Jean Harlow?
One day, Ceinwen discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have—just possibly—starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. So naturally, it’s time for a quest. She will track down the film, she will impress her neighbor, and she will become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue.
     As she embarks on her grand mission, Ceinwen meets a somewhat bumbling, very charming, 100% English math professor named Matthew, who is as rational as she is dreamy. Together, they will or will not discover the missing reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld.
     A novel as winning and energetic as the grand Hollywood films that inspired it, Missing Reels is an irresistible, alchemical mix of Nora Ephron and David Nicholls that will charm and delight.


Rumors of a lost silent film send a quirky heroine and her bemused boyfriend on a delightful escapade.
It may be tough to make ends meet on her shopgirl’s paycheck from Vintage Visions, but Ceinwen Reilly embraces a poor-yet-glamorous approach to life, dressing in retro fashions and watching classic movies every night. But the balance is upset when Matthew Hill, a charming British mathematician, and his snooty girlfriend, Anna, waltz into the store. Ceinwen’s dismay at Anna’s arrogance turns to horror when she buys the earrings Ceinwen had set aside for herself. Less than a week later, Matthew is back in the shop, inviting Ceinwen to dinner, and a vintage-film–fueled romance ensues. Maybe it’s the moonlight, or maybe it’s the movies, but Ceinwen becomes convinced that Miriam, her downstairs neighbor, was part of the silent-film industry. Trouble is, Miriam isn’t talking. Soon enough, Ceinwen has turned amateur detective, dragging Matthew along as Nick to her Nora Charles. GQ’s 2008 Film Blogger of the Year, Nehme seamlessly weaves film titles, trivia and technical lore into her debut novel. Her pacing is exhilarating, racing Ceinwen and Matthew (well, mostly Ceinwen) from an obscure film preservation society (run by a curator stern enough to frighten even the man secretly in love with her) to a vintage flicks screening club to a rather dodgy collector’s apartment. An array of fabulous minor characters pops up along the way. It’s a screwball comedy wedded to a gothic novel: Anna, Ceinwen’s rival for Matthew’s affections, is, of course, Italian; Matthew himself is Catholic; and the missing film is a classic of gothic fiction. Through it all, Ceinwen and Matthew patter at a speed Katherine Hepburn would admire.
Simply grand; this tale begs to be filmed. - Kirkus Reviews

Thanks to the parents of Farran Smith Nehme, she became a fan of old movies during her childhood in the 1970s when the family would watch them together on the then burgeoning cable TV stations. She became such an aficionado of pre-1960 films that nine years ago she started her classic film blog, “The Self Styled Siren,” and has written about both classic and contemporary films for such publications as the New York Post, the New York Times, and Barron’s Magazine. Three years ago, a friend who admired her blog style suggested that she write a novel. She says, “I always knew that if I wrote a novel, I wanted it to be something of a romantic comedy, because it’s my favorite genre. I love the old screwball comedies with the banter back and forth between the hero and the heroine, and I thought it might be fun to try and do one that’s set around film freaks themselves.”

Nehme’s debut novel, Missing Reels (Overlook Press, Nov.) takes place in the 1980s and features a hunt for a lost silent film. She notes, “I wanted to write about a different aspect of the 1980s in New York that most people don’t know about. There was a very active revival house scene in the days before TCM [Turner Classic Movies] of people going to see movies and trying to track down ones that they hadn’t seen. We didn’t know it at the time, but that scene would die by the end of the decade. But there was also the first stirrings of the first film preservation movement.”

She researched silent films for her book and discovered some disheartening statistics. “Nearly 80% of the silent films made in this country—in fact worldwide—are now gone, due to neglect, sometimes outright destruction, or because of the flammability of nitrate film stock. It’s all been a terrible cocktail that has resulted in tremendous losses. But more recently, spearheaded by the Library of Congress, there’s been a worldwide effort by film archives to go through and search their holdings, and they’re turning up some stuff that had been previously thought lost.”

Nehme is a regular at the TCM Classic Film Festival, but has never been to a book convention before. “I’m very excited about BEA because I know a lot of writers, and people who work in journalism in and around publishing, so just to see what it’s like—all the booths and everything—it’s completely brand new to me.”  - Publishers Weekly

The utterly winning, wholly delightful, totally cinematic debut novel of young love, old movies, and an epic search for a long-lost silent film

New York in the late 1980s. Ceinwen Reilly has just moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and she’s never going back, minimum wage job (vintage store salesgirl) and shabby apartment (Avenue C walkup) be damned. Who cares about earthly matters when Ceinwen can spend her days and her nights at fading movie houses—and most of the time that’s left trying to look like Jean Harlow?
One day, Ceinwen discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have—just possibly—starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. So naturally, it’s time for a quest. She will track down the film, she will impress her neighbor, and she will become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue.
As she embarks on her grand mission, Ceinwen meets a somewhat bumbling, very charming, 100% English math professor named Matthew, who is as rational as she is dreamy. Together, they will or will not discover the missing reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld.
A novel as winning and energetic as the grand Hollywood films that inspired it, Missing Reels is an irresistible, alchemical mix of Nora Ephron and David Nicholls that will charm and delight.


Few ideas ignite the cinephilic mind more than that of the lost film. The romance of what might have been, the tragedy of beauty discarded, the buried treasure fantasies of where the heretofore missing print might show up, and the wonder of the cinematic experience itself all combine to set the filmlover’s mind ablaze. 1917’s Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara and known only from a handful of publicity photos, the Lon Cheney-starring London After Midnight from 1927, Erich von Stroheim’s legendary nine hour director’s cut of Greed from 1924, and countless others are now assumed lost forever with no remaining prints. In cinema’s early days film prints were not seen as having any commercial or historical value once their viewing runs were completed, and the delicate, bulky reels of film were either discarded, poorly stored, or melted down for the trace amounts of silver in the nitrate stock. Some experts estimate that over half of all American films made in the first half of the twentieth century, and over 90% of all films made before 1929, are gone forever. It’s like the burning of the library of Alexandria, except with more close-ups and title cards.
If you’re a lover of classic films and this is new information for you, I’ll give you moment to gather yourself.
You good? Good.
The loss of so many early movies is a tragedy and a waste, but it does certainly send the mind racing. You see, every once in a while a “lost” film is found. A collector dies and a surviving print is found in his or her collection. A film was stored and forgotten in a warehouse and discovered half a century later. F. W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece of German Expressionism Metropolis has been rightly adored over the years, but only in a severely abridged form – much of the original theatrical version had been lost. Over recent decades however various prints of the film have been found in far-flung corners of the world – New Zealand, Argentina – that restore missing stretches of the film till it is now possible to view the movie at 95% of its original length.
Now if we could just find Orson Welles’s original edit of The Magnificent Ambersons…but I digress.
Few film bloggers write with more passion, knowledge, and romance about the Golden Age of cinema than Farran Smith Nehme, a.k.a. the Self-Styled Siren. Her blog has been a source of wit and wisdom about classic films for close to a decade, and when I found out last year she had a novel coming out at the end of the year – a novel about lost films and cinephilia – I couldn’t wait to read it. I read Missing Reels (Fic Nehme) over Christmas break and it felt just right for the season (like so many Hollywood classics that feel perfect for the holidays even when they don’t directly involve them).
Missing Reels stars Ceinwen Reilly (pronounced KINE-wen), a young woman who lives in New York City in the late 1980s. She’s broke, works at a vintage clothing shop, lives with her gay best friends Jim and Talmadge in a small apartment in a sketchy part of town, and watches classic movies at revival theaters and on VHS as often as she possibly can. She has a meet-cute with a handsome-but-not-single British math professor from NYU one day and they begin dating and sleeping together when his Italian girlfriend heads back to Europe. She becomes enamored with her elderly downstairs neighbor – a stately but aloof woman who has a fascinating past she will only reveal in fragments. Over time Ceinwen discovers this neighbor, Miriam, once starred in a silent film that is now believed lost. Ceinwen becomes obsessed with Miriam and the film – The Mysteries of Udolpho – and sets out to track down any piece of information about the movie she can. The more she uncovers about the film, its surviving cast and crew, and the strange world of silent film collectors, the more she begins to hang on to the slim hope a print of the film might have survived. Can she hold onto her British beau when his girlfriend comes back to town? Can she find the lost film and restore the memory of a forgotten director and star?
Missing Reels is a charming adventure for lovers of classic cinema, and a bit of a love letter (or maybe more of a cheeky love note) to New York City. It’s no deep literary exploration of human nature or existential pondering, but it neither tries nor needs to be. It wouldn’t be the same book if its aims were any deeper than they are. It isn’t interested in being The Bicycle Thief. It’s a stylish and terribly clever romp much more interested in being The Thin Man or Trouble in Paradise.
I have a handful of complaints about the book, but upon reflection I might be arguing myself out of them. I mentioned the meet-cute above, and the love story does at times feel superimposed onto the underlying themes of the book. The story’s loose ends tidy up a bit too cleanly in the final pages. There are too many coincidences and the world of possible characters in this enormous city is a bit small and familiar. But isn’t that classic cinema? Melodrama and romance, style and coincidence and escapism, excitement and tragedy, dramatic exits and camera dissolves and happy endings? I don’t mean by any of this the book is unintelligent; on the contrary, I think the choices the Siren (sorry, I know her better by the third-person moniker she uses in her blogging) makes here reflect more of her knowledge of old movies than any weakness of plot structure or failure of realism. We don’t watch Casablanca because it’s a realistic dissection of the refugee situation in World War II Morocco. We watch it because we will never be that cool, and we will never look that good in soft focus. The Siren knows what she’s doing, even if the audience rolls their eyes once or twice.
If you love old films, you owe it to yourself to check out this book. if you don’t yet love old films, Missing Reels might change that. It might be the best black and white movie you’ll read this year. - David N.


For hardcore film obsessives, there's no movie so thrillingly obscure as one that doesn't exist. ''Lost movies appeal to our sense of doomed artistry,'' a film scholar tells our heroine, Ceinwen Reilly, in the absorbing debut novel Missing Reels. ''We build up heroic concepts of certain directors. Then, when their work is lost, we imagine what we're missing as even better than the movies we have.''
That sums up Missing Reels' romantic view of cinema nicely, although these words might be hard for Ceinwen to hear. She's living in New York during the 1980s, when the revival-house scene is booming. And when she's not dressing up like Jean Harlow to work as a shopgirl at Vintage Visions, or forcing her gay roommates/BFFs to watch Shanghai Express, she's hunting for her own lost classic, The Mysteries of Udolpho, a silent film that may or may not star her downstairs neighbor Miriam. When Ceinwen meets Matthew, a dashing British mathematician, Missing Reels starts to feel like a classic movie itself: There's a dramatic screwball romance and an exciting hard-boiled mystery, as well as one too many monologues. There's also enough trivia to delight any cinephile. Glancing at Ceinwen's outfit, Miriam says that if she really wanted to look like Jean Harlow, she wouldn't wear underwear.
The film-snob debates in this book will remind you why so many great relationships are built upon shared passions. That's true for Ceinwen and Matthew, and maybe also for Farran Smith Nehme and you, if you're a movie buff. Once named GQ's Film Blogger of the Year for her classic-film criticism site, Self-Styled Siren, Nehme knows how to mix real-life history with fictional directors, actors, and films, making the true stuff just as compelling as the imagined. By the end, you'll be desperate to see The Mysteries of Udolpho. So maybe it's a good thing that like all the best movies, it doesn't exist.- Melissa Maerz  


This week marks the publication of Missing Reels, the first novel by Farran Smith Nehme, full of a wit, style, and romance—and, of course, movie love—that will be immediately recognizable to readers of her blog (Self-Styled Siren), along with her essays for the Criterion Collection and elsewhere. On the occasion, we asked film critic Molly Haskell, like Nehme a great friend of Criterion, to have an e-mail chat with her Old Hollywood–loving soul mate and fellow southern transplant, about her leap into fiction and what inspired it.

 

Molly Haskell: First of all, congratulations on a terrific novel. It’s wonderfully fresh and original, a combination of screwball comedy and mystery story. And like you, and your heroine, Ceinwen—who also happens to be a southern transplant!—it’s in love with silent cinema. Tell me how the idea came to you and how it evolved.

Farran Smith Nehme: Thank you so much. I hadn’t intended to write a novel, but some friends—perhaps in a spirit of mischief, considering the work involved—had been telling me I should try. There was one problem, though: I didn’t have a plot. I stumbled across an idea by accident, and here I get to name-drop Kevin Brownlow, one of my heroes. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a dinner with him in New York, during which we heard many stories about the world of collectors and the strange ways Brownlow has tracked down the elements of the films he’s restored. I said to him something like “I guess collecting attracts some strange characters.” He leaned in and said, with a big grin and a twinkle, “You have no idea.” I liked that line so much it wound up in the novel.
I immediately thought of a book that would involve latter-day movie buffs discovering the existence of a long-lost, forgotten silent movie and then trying to track it down. I needed a time period when silent-movie makers could still plausibly be alive and well, so I chose the 1980s. Gradually, I worked out the idea of a young woman on the Lower East Side who was church-mouse-poor, working a dead-end job, and spending her time at revival houses and recording old movies off the TV. And yes, that was me in the ’80s, although Ceinwen’s personality differs from mine in many important respects. Also, I’m sorry to say I never met anyone who made a silent film.
MH: I love the Brownlow story. I remember traipsing down to the East Village, and the Theatre 80 St. Marks, with Andrew [Sarris] in the ’80s. Although I thought they had mostly talkies, from the early ’30s. Also, Bill Everson used to show movies fairly regularly at the New School. He comes into your novel, as do other real people, along with the buffs and geeks. Ceinwen is so poor and disenfranchised, she doesn’t have a license or a passport, and presumably no membership to MoMA, where she really could feast on silent films. She has a kind of tunnel vision; she’s hooked on the past, which allows you to ignore a lot of cinematic activity that was going on around that time—the critical spats, Cahiers du cinéma in English, foreign films.
FSN: Yes, I don’t think Theatre 80 ever screened silent movies, although they certainly showed some rare talkies. Literary license is one of the perks of novel writing, as opposed to my blogging, where I labor to check every fact. Ceinwen sees her old-movie habit as a hobby and an escape, but she isn’t plugged into the scene, as you say. One thing that Raquel Stecher mentioned in her review of this book is how old-movie lovers crave the company of like-minded people, and how difficult finding such company could be in the days before the Internet. Ceinwen eventually solves the problem by meeting some folks, and just plain drafting some others as foot soldiers for her obsessions. By the end, as she’s matured, you can see that her movie taste has expanded, too.
MH: Yes, buffs sought each other out. I wrote in my Andrew memoir [Love and Other Infectious Diseases] about the Huff Society, an informal group that met to see this or that utterly obscure film in odd, makeshift places, NYU classrooms . . . There would be people like your novel’s NYU professors Andy Evans and Harry (though the latter is a little too normal). Andrew used to joke that they would rather see a film that nobody had ever seen than a truly good film—indeed, the criterion for “goodness” would be unknownness. And Bill Everson’s living room was also a place for such viewings. You capture this superbly. For instance, in the glorious Bangville Police Society, who love to watch Mack Sennett two-reelers for obvious reasons. How did you get that delicious idea?
FSN: I remember the Huff Society from your book, and I did think about it when I was writing Missing Reels. But the Bangville Police Society mostly arose from something Hooman Mehran, another film scholar, told me about: the Sons of the Desert, a wonderful group founded fifty years ago to celebrate Laurel and Hardy. I never went to one of their meetings, because I wanted to freely imagine my own silent-film society, and populate it with screwballs who I could honestly describe as figments of my imagination. But when I went to their website, I did notice that, rather delightfully in an age when every day is casual Friday, they still have a dress code. So I used that, too. Now that the novel is finished, I really want to go to one of their meetings. Properly attired, of course.
Unfortunately, there’s no real-life counterpart to the Brody Institute, but you never know when a rich person might take it into their head to fund a film archive. This is what I tell myself, anyway.
MH: Let’s talk about the mysterious Miriam, the actress who quite plausibly dates back to silent film and becomes an interesting counterpoint to Ceinwen, who’s desperately trying to find out more about her. The contrast between the fairly repressed Ceinwen and the worldly older woman is very funny, and is established in a juicy scene having to do with Jean Harlow.
FSN: Miriam is probably my favorite character in the book. When I read interviews with stars from the old days, I have a perverse affection for the ones who don’t want to cooperate. Who refuse to indulge the interviewer’s fantasies and snap back that a costar was a bottom-pinching lech or an insufferable diva, and that the scene you’ve always loved was a thumping bore to put on film. For her background, I wove together a number of silent-movie stars’ stories, although I’ll confess here that there is a lot of Mary Astor in Miriam, minus Astor’s real politics, which were pretty solidly right-wing, as I recall. I picked Jean Harlow as the star Ceinwen would be trying to mimic because a Harlow imitator is pretty easy to spot. Miriam might not recognize a girl who was dressing like Norma Shearer.
MH: I too like Miriam’s stubborn refusal to indulge any of Ceinwen’s fantasies, to the point of outright rudeness. (I think we’re having a rash of great ornery older women in fiction and film these days, as if feminism has liberated them from the need to please, maybe even activated a desire to displease!) There is Ceinwen, young and fresh and dressing in vintage—or what Miriam sees as simply drab old clothes. It’s quite funny. Ceinwen naturally thinks she’ll be thrilled at all this activity on her behalf, but the old lady—erstwhile actress and seamstress!—refuses to be drawn into the hunt for her lost film.

FSN: We hear so much about the tragic ends of forgotten stars, but plenty of people fail in Hollywood and move on, without becoming destitute or alcoholic. I wanted my forgotten actress to be one of those, someone who quietly took on another life.

MH: There’s plenty to satisfy arcane film buff tastes, but also a charming love story, full of witty repartee, between Matthew, a rather dashing British mathematician, and a suspicious and defensive Ceinwen. She’s living a kind of asocial life with two gay roommates, and in her back-and-forth with Matthew she evolves socially, develops a kind of aplomb she didn’t have in the beginning. Becomes a more graceful geek! Talk about that relationship, how it resembles and differs from the screwball comedies we love.

FSN: I love the idea of Ceinwen becoming a more graceful geek. I knew all along that I wanted my novel to be a romantic comedy, to suggest that the couples I love from the great era of screwball comedy can still exist in a modern setting. Often the woman character brings a man out of his shell, like in My Man Godfrey or The Lady Eve. I wanted to spin that out a little bit, to where it’s the heroine who’s most in need of an expanded worldview. Matthew has been sailing through what’s pretty much a charmed life. He’s baffled and intrigued by Ceinwen’s living arrangements, her seeming lack of ambition, the way she gets through her days by avoiding the present as much as possible. And when she drags this functioning adult into her obsessions, it begins to dawn on Ceinwen that certain trappings of modern life are worth acquiring. Like a driver’s license.

MH: Yes, Matthew is definitely the smoother one. Sometimes both members of the screwball couple are awkward, as in Bringing Up Baby. But both are always in need of some kind of education, to use Stanley Cavell’s term. Also I think you have to feel some growing common ground, for the conversations that will follow. And Matthew really does develop an interest in movies, and Ceinwen a feeling for math and its “elegant” metaphors. I like the obliqueness of the sex scenes, and the chaotic climax engineered by a now-intrepid Ceinwen.

Now, just one more question: Was there anyone in your southern childhood or growing up like Ceinwen’s grandmother—someone who got you interested in films and movies, or simply in the larger world? Someone to whom you feel your book might be dedicated, either actually or secretly?

FSN: When I was growing up in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, it was the early days of cable TV and there was an endless supply of old movies on television. My mother was very protective about my seeing violent or vulgar movies, but I figured out early that if the film was old, I could watch whatever I wanted. I don’t know what it is about my particular makeup that made me latch on to black and white, to the vivid personalities and the dialogue. It was probably escapism at least in part; I was a weird, bookish kid, and I didn’t have much of a social life. But both of my parents were happy to watch things with me on occasion, too. Dad’s favorite director was John Ford, he also loved Hawks, and he had me watching Citizen Kane at age ten. Mom loved screwball comedies and musicals and big sweeping melodramas, like the Douglas Sirk version of Imitation of Life. So between the two of them, I got a pretty good old-movie education.
Back in those days, nobody thought twice about watching a movie chopped up for commercials, pan-and-scan in an old, scuffed-up print. Well, nobody I knew, that is. (I remember your husband’s horrified anecdote about encountering a man at a party who edited movies for television. The man claimed he’d been vastly improving the Astaire-Rogers movies by editing out “those boring musical numbers.”) Of course, it’s much better to see things as close to the original as possible. But one aspect of Missing Reels is that you no more need ideal circumstances to fall in love with a movie than you do to fall for a person.
- www.criterion.com/current/posts/3378-downtown-screwball-a-conversation-between-farran-smith-nehme-and-molly-haskell