Howard A. Rodman is the author of the novels Destiny Express and The Great Eastern. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Black Clock, and elsewhere. As a screenwriter his films include Joe Gould’s Secret; August with Josh Hartnett, Rip Torn, and David Bowie; and Savage Grace with Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne.
On television, he’s written for Fallen Angels and staffed on HBO Max’s The Idol. He’s a vice president of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Writers Guild of America West. Rodman is one of seventeen members of the Screenwriters Hall of Fame, and was knighted by the Republic of France as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
As an academic, Rodman is professor and former chair of the division of screenwriting at USC; as a journalist, he’s published hundreds of articles beginning with his tenure as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun. In 2011 Rodman organized the nationwide Fantômas centennial, and remains on the steering committee of NOIRCON. Those who lived through the post-punk era in lower Manhattan may have seen him play guitar with the bands Arsenal and MADE IN USA. A proud son of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Rodman currently lives in Los Angeles.
About Destiny Express:
Hailed as “caviar for the art-film buff” by Kirkus Reviews, the novel Destiny Express captures the glamour and the terror of an era, dramatizing the perilous moment when art, politics, and destiny converged on the tracks out of Berlin.
Berlin, the last day of February, 1933. The Reichstag lies in smoldering ruins, a new world about to spring from its ashes. And now for German filmmakers the choices are stark: stay and collaborate with a government that believes in cinema’s power to shape reality, or leave everything behind. Destiny Express is the story of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, husband and wife, director and screenwriter—together, they made some of the greatest films of all time: M., Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse. As each day is torn from the calendar they watch as one by one Bertolt Brecht, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, take the next train out. Destiny Express follows Lang, von Harbou, and a host of real and fictional others––novelist-turned-minister-of-culture Joseph Goebbels, American café Surrealist Sam Harrison, Mercedes racing champ Otto Merz, film star Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a pair of not-so-secret police—as their paths converge, intertwine, and separate across the grid of Berlin, from the artificial daylight of the UFA soundstage to the artificial night of Berlin's most exclusive and decadent nightclubs.
Harsh lights, long shadows: the perfect setting for a deeply researched, deftly imagined tale, as one character puts it, of “crime, gambling, cocaine, jazz, stock exchange maneuvers, smuggling, hypnosis, counterfeiting, violence, Expressionism.” Destiny Express is the story of a marriage at the end of its passion, at the edge of history—all at the end of an era when film was to mean more than it ever would again.
About The Great Eastern:
From the shipyards of London to the ports of New York, from the undersea abyss to the halls of empire, The Great Eastern is a sweeping tale of invention, rebellion, and the war between creation and destruction.
A vast iron ship. Two legendary captains. A battle for the soul of an age.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the world stood on the brink of transformation. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the audacious engineer, dares to build the largest vessel ever conceived—the Great Eastern, a ship so immense it might stitch continents together with telegraphic wire. But beneath the waves lurks Captain Nemo, haunted genius of the submarine Nautilus, sworn enemy of empire and progress alike. When Nemo discovers Brunel’s plans, he vows to destroy both the ship and the world it represents.
Into this collision of titans steps another ghost of literature and legend: Captain Ahab, dragged from his watery grave, driven by obsession and vengeance, and drawn inexorably into the struggle between Brunel’s vision and Nemo’s rage.
At once a thrilling sea adventure and a subversive reimagining of classic myth, Howard A. Rodman’s audacious novel resurrects larger-than-life characters to tell a story that is as strange and wondrous as the century that gave birth to them. As Ricky Jay put it, “The Great Eastern is a nook of confabulations, real and imagined. Surprises on every page. A splendid and notable achievement.”
Howard A. Rodman will be in conversation with Shawn Levy.
Shawn Levy is the author of a dozen books, including the bestsellers The Castle on Sunset, Paul Newman: A Life, and Rat Pack Confidential and the prize-winning Dolce Vita Confidential. The former film critic for The Oregonian and KGW-TV, he lives and works and raises heck in Portland, Oregon.