Dennis Quaid Still Has "The Right Stuff"
Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 4:34PM by Nathaniel R
Dennis Quaid as "Gordon Cooper" in THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)
Have you noticed how many movie stars are doing audiobooks these days? (I have a friend who keeps raving about Armie Hammer's reading of Call Me By Your Name.) But it's not just current movies with complimentary audiobooks. There's a new audiobook out this week for Tom Wolfe's 1979 nonfiction bestseller "The Right Stuff" about the astronauts of the Mercury Space Program in the 1940s and 1950s. Dennis Quaid is doing the audiobook honors this time and he famously co-starred in that book's Oscar-favored adaptation in 1983. The Right Stuff (1983) won four craft Oscars in its year (splitting the below-the-line prizes with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander) and if you haven't seen it you really should. It's quite good.
Here's a little bit of Dennis's familiar comfy gravel voice reading the book... sadly it's not a scene about his character but a scene involving Fred Ward's character Gus Grissom.
Reader Comments (5)
but a scene involving Fred Ward's character Gus Grissom...
...screwing the pooch!
Can someone please convince Maggie Smith, Ellen Burstyn, Vanessa Redgrave, Jeremy Irons, Hellen Mirren, Geoffrey Rush, Liza Minelli & Christopher Plummer to do an audio book? They need to lock down their EGOT with a Grammy. Plus, they all have such wonderful voices - Grammy or not, they'd be wonderful to listen to!
Well damn, Ellsworth, while we’re mentioning it let’s throw Viola in there too. Not to mention her voice is so imposing and inperious it would fit any number of books.
I remember seeing this in 70mm on a huge screen and it was extraordinary.
We talk a lot about actresses here, but The Right Stuff had such a terrific young male cast. Quaid, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Sam Shepard, and Fred Ward, all at the beginning of their careers. The scene between John Glenn (Harris) and Annie Glenn (Mary Jo Deschanel, wife of Caleb and mother of the Deschanel sisters) in which John tells Annie she doesn't have to meet with LBJ if she doesn't want to is one of the best scenes demonstrating the love between two married people in all of cinema... I don't know if it's accurate, but it always made me love the Glenns.
The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Henry & June... Philip Kaufman deserves to be much more appreciated.