The Aspen Institute

Screening @ 5 p.m. followed by panel discussion @ 7 p.m.

What are the artistic challenges and rewards of translating literature into cinema? Following a screening of “Leave No Trace,” Aspen Words Executive Director Adrienne Brodeur will get the inside story from producer Linda Reisman and Peter Rock, author of “My Abandonment,” the award-winning novel upon which the film is based.

First captivated by Rock’s novel while working as an editor in New York, Brodeur acquired it for publisher Houghton Mifflin. She later gave the book to Reisman, who knew it had to be made into a film. Hear why this story was so compelling to novelist, editor and filmmaker and go behind the scenes to discover its fascinating journey from book to big screen.

For more information and to watch the trailer, click here.

Tickets
Film + panel: $25 general admission, $20 Aspen Words + Aspen Film members
Panel only: $15 general admission, $10 Aspen Words + Aspen Film members

Tickets go on sale September 7 for Aspen Words + Aspen Film members, and on September 12 for non-members.
All tickets will be available at the Wheeler Opera House box office and aspenshowtix.com

PANELISTS

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City.  His most recent book is “SPELLS,” a novel-within-photographs that is a collaboration with five photographers and concerns shadows and bodies, the living and the dead, talking animals and all manner of shape-shifting. He is also the author of the novels “Klickitat,” “The Shelter Cycle,” “My Abandonment,” “The Bewildered,” “The Ambidextrist,” “Carnival Wolves” and “This Is the Place,” and a story collection, “The Unsettling.”  Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a professor in the English department of Reed College. “Leave No Trace,” the film adaptation of “My Abandonment,” directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released in 2018.  Rock’s tenth work of fiction, “The Night Swimmers,” will be published in 2019.

Linda Reisman is an independent film producer whose credits include “Leave No Trace,” directed by Debra Granik (“Winter’s Bone”) and based on the novel “My Abandonment” by Peter Rock. The film stars Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and premiered at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals. Reisman was executive producer of “The Danish Girl,” directed by Tom Hooper and starring Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander. The film received four Academy Award nominations and Vikander won for Best Supporting Actress.  

For several years, Reisman was head of production for Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope. She served as executive producer on “Jeepers Creepers,” “No Such Thing,” “Assassination Tango” and “Pumpkin” for the company. Reisman also produced “Waking the Dead,” directed by Keith Gordon from the novel by Scott Spencer, and the critically acclaimed “Affliction,” directed by Paul Schrader and based on the novel by Russell Banks. Other production credits include “Mother Night,” “Light Sleeper,” “The Comfort of Strangers” and “Patty Hearst.”

Reisman is the senior distinguished producer–in-residence at Emerson College and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America.

MODERATOR

Adrienne Brodeur is an award-winning editor and author with 20 years of writing, editing and publishing experience. Her memoir “Wild Game” will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019. Her debut novel, “Man Camp” (Random House, 2005), was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. Her essays have run in The New York Times. She was an acquiring editor at Harcourt and HMH and founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with filmmaker Francis Coppola, which has won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction four times. She has served as a judge for the National Book Award, the National Magazine Award  and the New York Public Library’s Young Lion’s fiction award. She has been with Aspen Words since 2013, first as Creative Director and since 2016 as Executive Director.