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Luke Doesn't Get The Rapture Screenwriter and journalist Rodger Jacobs aka Martin Brimmer phoned me Tuesday night 7/2/02. Rodger: "You just don't get it [The Rapture (1991)], do you? Now, I've read all of Michael Tolkin's books... It's about the inability to feel beyond superficiality." Luke: "Oh." Rodger: "It's about the inability of modern humans to even comprehend things that are transcendent such as God and stuff." Luke thinks: Usually when people write about the inability of humanity to do X and Y, it is because they can't do X and Y. So maybe Tolkin is unable to comprehend the transcendent. Rodger: "It's no mistake allegorically that her job is as a telephone operator. You need to put all your theology aside and give the film another look and pay attention to the characters and some of the symbolism going on there. "Because of technology, we are so different from humans 2000 years ago. We're hopeless. Let's say the rapture would happen. So few of us would even make the cut. She spends so much of her life in oblivion and giving in to material desires, so by the time she turns around... And when she does turn around, she does it from a self-centered place. It's not real. It's not pure. "My favorite book of Tolkin's is Among the Dead, a take on Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby the Scrivener. I admire him greatly. Paul Schrader is another screenwriter who injects a lot of moralism into movies." A direct descendant of the notorious Dalton family of Old West banditry fame, Jacobs parlayed his knowledge of the Daltons and, more appropriately, their distant cousins Jesse and Frank James, into a stint as research consultant on the 1979 western "The Long Riders" for producer Stacy Keach and director Walter Hill. Throughout the 1980's Jacobs toiled as a screenwriter for various independent producers including actor Randy Quaid, for whom Jacobs developed a screenplay from the darkly comedic William Hjortsberg novel, "Alp". He also served as a development executive for the late Warren Stein ("Under the Gun") in 1992. As a journalist, his work has appeared in Eye Magazine, Hustler, Panik, Mind Kites, and E Commerce Business Magazine. Jacobs is divorced and the father of one daughter, Carole Ann Jacobs. As a stage manager for Hollywood Center Studios from 1985 through 1991, Jacobs worked on such films as "Scrooged", "Misery", "Wired", "The Running Man", "Exorcist 3", "8 Million Ways To Die", "Throw Mama From The Train", and "When Harry Met Sally". |