BLEAK HOTEL, the new book from author D.M. Thomas, is out now in hardback. A work of non-fiction, it tells the story of the failed film adaptations of his multi award-winning novel The White Hotel. Excerpts from the book have also been serialised in The Sunday Times.
In 1981, D. M. Thomas published his seminal novel THE WHITE HOTEL – within months of its publication, he received an offer to option the film rights. To this day, the film has never been made.
“The story goes that it was Barbra Streisand who started it off ... Someone remarked that she ought to look for an intelligent, demanding role, and suggested The White Hotel ... Bernardo Bertolucci told me, years later, Streisand had invited him to her Hollywood mansion to discuss the film over dinner… She said, `Bernardo, there's just one thing bothering me: how are we going to deal with all the sex?' `Well, Barbra, I have this idea for glass fibre optics to enter the woman's vagina.' A moment's silence, then: `Let me show you the house.' And she never spoke of The White Hotel to him again.”
BLEAK HOTEL traces the story of 26 years of the non-making of this very film. A gripping story of frustration, hope, and ultimately, of indifference to both the machinations of the film industry and the legal maelstrom that surrounds it. An array of big names have been attached to the making of this non-movie, from its greatest producers and directors to Hollywood's brightest stars and starlets: screenplay by Chuck Mee or Dennis Potter; directed by David Cronenburg, Terence Mallick, Bertolucci, David Lynch or Emir Kusturica; starring Isabella Rossellini, Meryl Streep or Juliette Binoche; Brian Cox, Dustin Hoffman, Bruno Ganz or Anthony Hopkins. And still the film remains in the imagination.
This account is interwoven with colourful and moving tales of D. M. Thomas’s personal life, involving tangled love relationships and the pain of bereavement. This book will be heralded as a seminal account of how the highest literary intentions can be bruised and battered by the ramifications of Show Biz, and will ensure its author’s travails will rank alongside the Hollywood writings of Nathanael West, Walker Percy and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
