Podtalk: Director Michael Caplan of the Documentary ‘Algren’

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

CHICAGO – When Michael Caplan began his journey creating the film biography of legendary Chicago author Nelson Algren, he was a self-described “fan” but not much else. After spending several years with the man who wrote “The Man with the Golden Arm,” Michael Caplan has certainly got to know him well.

Caplan has produced a long overdue comprehensive documentary on writer Nelson Algren that gets into the weeds of his amazing life as an outlier and chronicler of the dispossessed. After graduating college during the Depression, Algren spent time as a drifter and collected the experiences – along with observations in his eventual Chicago ne’er-do-well west side neighborhood – that became his run of literary classics. This includes “The Neon Wilderness,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “A Walk on the Wild Side” and “Chicago: The City on the Make,” not to mention an infamous affair with French feminist author Simone De Beauvoir.

’Algren,’ Directed by Michael Caplan (inset)
Photo credit: First Run Features

Michael Caplan is an academic (as an Associate Professor of Documentary and Producing at Columbia College in Chicago) and award-winning independent film director and producer. He has produced multiple award-winning feature films, including “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” which traced the coming of age of a gay man in New York in the 1980s. THE NEW YORK TIMES reviewed it as “not just a performance but captured the spirit of a time.”

In Part One of a Podtalk with Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com, Michael Caplan talks all about Nelson in “Algren” …

In Part Two, the professor talks about documentary form in the tech age and the question he’d ask Nelson Algren if he were to appear before him …

For a 4.5/5 REVIEW of “Algren” by Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com, click ALGREN.

By PATRICK McDONALD Editor and Film Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com