The book stings with a teen’s dawning understanding of life’s cruelties and a yearning for an innocence already slipping away. so male book critics would be inclined to take her work more seriously.) Hinton’s tale of greasers and socs (pronounced “soshes,” short for “socials”) bullying and switch-blade fighting at the drive-ins and vacant lots of their dead-end town remains a rite of passage for young readers to this day. Susan Eloise Hinton famously wrote “The Outsiders” when she was a sophomore at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa. Thomas Howell played our protagonist Ponyboy Curtis, supported by a cast including Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs again.” After an arduous audition process it was the campers Coppola chose that launched a thousand Tiger Beat magazine covers, spawning what became known as “The Brat Pack.” C. “I used to be a great camp counselor,” Coppola told a New York Times reporter in 1983, “and the idea of being with half a dozen kids in the country and making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. Librarian Jo Ellen Misakian of the Lone Star School in Fresno, California sent the filmmaker a letter signed by over 300 students asking him to please make a movie out of their favorite book. Coppola’s achingly heartfelt adaptation of Hinton’s 1967 novel had the most unlikely of origins: a petition.

1 as part of the Somerville Theatre’s “Play It Cool II” series, and it’s worth taking another look at this oft-mocked operatic curio on a giant screen.

Hinton.Ī 35mm print of “The Outsiders” screens on Wednesday, Aug. (As with megaflops like Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” and Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love,” musicals proved the Achilles heel of the New Hollywood mavericks.) One step ahead of his creditors and squabbling with Wim Wenders over reshoots on the latter's Coppola-produced English language debut 'Hammett,' it was, in the filmmaker's own words, 'chaos incorporated time.' So that's when the director of 'The Godfather' films and 'Apocalypse Now' up and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for a while to be the cinematic voice of YA novelist S.E. Francis Ford Coppola’s dream of owning his own independent movie studio had come crashing down with the cataclysmic failure of his “One From The Heart,” a quixotic soundstage musical overwhelmed by its own production design. The Don was in exile during the early ‘80s. The cast of 'The Outsiders.' (Courtesy Warner Bros.) This article is more than 4 years old.

Susan eloise hinton the outsiders