Funny Boys, the latest novel by War of the Roses author Warren Adler about the Borscht Belt and Murder Inc.(circa1937) has been optioned for a film. It is the 12th novel of Mr. Adler’s bought or optioned by Hollywood.

Mr. Adler, whose The War of the Roses novel was adapted as a movie with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner and Random Hearts with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, has published 30 novels which have been translated into 25 foreign languages.

Funny Boys is the story of a comedian, or in the Yiddish idiom of the time, a “tumler,” in a Catskill mountain resort hotel in 1937 who gets entangled with the mobsters of Murder Inc.

The story authentically reenacts the speech and customs of the era. In the thirties, forties and fifties the area was known as the Borscht Belt and nourished the careers of some of the most famous comedians of the time such as Milton Berle, Red Button, Jerry Lewis, Sam Levinson, Myron Cohen, Sid Caesar and scores of others.…

Read more: FUNNY BOYS, LATEST NOVEL BY WARREN ADLER OPTIONED FOR FILM

As the fifth year of the Warren Adler Short Story Competition draws to a close I thought it would interesting to share some of my observations about what I have learned about these so-called “contests” and the nature and motivation of those who submit and those who judge.

Before such competition proliferated on the internet I was involved in two short story competitions as both motivator and judge sponsored by the State of Wyoming Arts Council, a state in which I happily resided for nearly two decades.

First, my own motivation in helping to initiate and sponsor such a contest. I have always loved the short story as a literary device. In my opinion it is a literary art form of great purity, requiring discipline, a sense of craft, the skillful use of condensation and the challenge of narrative drive to swiftly engage the reader’s interest. Slightly exaggerating the imagery, I look upon the form as creating a vast world on the head of a pin.…

Read more: Our Short Story Competition

The Hurt Locker, a film about a bomb squad in Iraq is a most amazing film, and one of the few films of recent vintage which actually tells the truth about what it means to be a professional soldier. Indeed, it is so different from the usual politically charged tripe about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that one wonders how the director Kathryn Bigelow ever got it made.

Indeed, ever since Vietnam, American servicemen, especially those in enlisted status have been characterized by the mediaocrity as using the services as a kind of last resort, a collection of losers at the bottom of the social barrel who join the Army to suck up benefits they could not get as civilians. Hollywood, which gets its cue from the same source, has often failed to understand the motivation of the professional soldier.
At the screening I attended, Kathryn Bigelow was on hand to answer questions posed by the audience.…

Read more: At Last, A True Film About the Professional Soldier