Vital portrait of the late novelist, playwright and TV personality, born a Washington DC insider and a biting critic of successive US regimes. “Captures Gore Vidal in all his ever-articulate glory.” — Hollywood Reporter
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2013
Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia 2013
“Nicholas Wrathall’s film… does exactly what it should: It makes you miss Gore Vidal. To paraphrase one of the doc’s many learned witnesses, he spent his life being a thorn in the side of the very establishment to which he was born. The grandson of a US senator, a relative by marriage to Jackie Kennedy, a distant cousin of Al Gore and a confidant of everyone from Paul Newman to Tennessee Williams to Christopher Hitchens, Vidal virtually invented the modern historical novel, was an essayist, playwright, TV personality and perhaps the most cynical commentator ever on the congenital deformity of American politics. Wrathall covers all the predictable moments, and skirmishes – Vidal’s notorious TV duels with William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, for example. But for all the history Wrathall revisits, he also gets beyond Vidal the caustic raconteur, droll critic and Olympian cynic and provides an intimate portrait of a man who may have been the last of his breed, the celebrity intellectual.” — John Anderson, Indiewire