J.D. Salinger, Unmasked

Are you ready for the J.D. Salinger documentary and the 800-page biography of the author? Newsweek discusses both secret projects, here.

From the piece...

Salerno’s disdain for inauthenticity—if a Kindle counts as such—is more or less his mission statement for what he calls “the very definition of a passion project”: writing, funding, and directing a two-hour documentary, Salinger, and an 800-page biography, The Private War of J. D. Salinger, co-written with David Shields. The pair of forthcoming works are as shrouded as their subject, but Salerno hopes they will be the definitive word on the writer. “We’ve been sifting through all this new material to contextualize this giant of American literature,” he says of the 15,000 pages of interview transcripts and more than 100 personal photos he’s amassed. “You’re going to see a very different Salinger than you’ve read about for five decades.” The Private War is arranged nonchronologically to help fill in the author’s “missing” years, and Salerno says both projects boast a variety of first-evers in addition to the photo collection, including interviews with Salinger intimates and former New Yorker colleagues, some of whom had never spoken about “Jerry.” “When you’re sitting two feet from someone who hasn’t spoken in five or six decades about this, there is just an electricity that surges through the room,” Salerno says—though, of course, he won’t name names.