Padme's Library: 📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘: Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Friday, February 23, 2018

📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘: Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Summary:
Penguin Books is proud to now be the sole publisher of Oil!, the classic 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair. After writing The Jungle, his scathing indictment of the meatpacking industry, Sinclair turned his sights on the early days of the California oil industry in a highly entertaining story featuring a cavalcade of characters including senators, oil magnets, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist.

This lively and panoramic book, which was recently cited by David Denby in the New Yorker as being Sinclair’s “most readable” novel, is now the inspiration for the Paramount Vantage major motion picture, There Will Be Blood. It is the long-awaited film from Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most admired filmmakers working today whose previous movies, Boogie Nights and Magnolia were both multiple Academy Award nominees. The movie stars Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York, My Left Foot) and Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine).

Paramount Vantage will be releasing the film in New York and Los Angeles on December 26, 2007 and go nationwide in January. This is the same company responsible for Babel and A Mighty Heart and the current releases, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, and The Kite Runner.

As wars rage on in the oil region and as anxiety over natural resources rise, the subject of this book, which celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2007, is more timely than ever.

Film
In turn-of-the-century California, a prospector transforms himself into an oil tycoon and drifts into corruption the more successful he becomes.

Release Date: December 26, 2007
Release Time: 158 minutes

Cast:
Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview
Paul Dano as Paul Sunday and Eli Sunday
Kevin J. O'Connor as Henry
Ciarán Hinds as Fletcher Hamilton
Dillon Freasier as H.W. Plainview
Russell Harvard as adult H.W. Plainview
Sydney McCallister as Mary Sunday
Colleen Foy as adult Mary
David Willis as Abel Sunday
Hans Howes as William Bandy
Paul F. Tompkins as Prescott
Jim Downey as Al Rose
David Warshofsky as H.M. Tilford
Barry Del Sherman as H.B. Ailman

Awards:
2008 Academy Awards
Best Picture - Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson - Nominated
Best Director - Paul Thomas Anderson - Nominated
Best Actor - Daniel Day-Lewis - Won
Best Adapted Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson - Nominated
Best Art Direction - Jack Fisk, Jim Erickson - Nominated
Best Cinematography - Robert Elswit - Won
Best Film Editing - Dylan Tichenor - Nominated
Best Sound Editing - Matthew Wood, Christopher Scarabosio - Nominated

2008 BAFTAs
Best Film - Nominated
Best Direction - Paul Thomas Anderson - Nominated
Best Adapted Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson - Nominated
Best Actor in a Leading Role - Daniel Day-Lewis - Won
Best Actor in a Supporting Role - Paul Dano - Nominated
Best Film Music - Jonny Greenwood - Nominated
Best Production Design - Jack Fisk, Jim Erickson - Nominated
Best Cinematography - Robert Elswit - Nominated
Best Sound - Matthew Wood - Nominated

2008 Golden Globes
Best Actor–Motion Picture Drama - Daniel Day-Lewis - Won
Best Motion Picture–Drama - Nominated

Trailer

Clips

Author Bio:
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.