Ithaca Page #2

Synopsis: Fourteen-year-old Homer Macauley is determined to be the best and fastest bicycle telegraph messenger anyone has ever seen. His older brother has gone to war, leaving Homer to look after his widowed mother, his older sister and his 4-year-old brother, Ulysses. And so it is that as spring turns to summer, 1942, Homer Macauley delivers messages of love, hope, pain... and death... to the good people of Ithaca. And Homer Macauley will grapple with one message that will change him forever. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan's 1943 novel, The Human Comedy, ITHACA is a coming-of-age story about the exuberance of youth, the abruptness of change, the sweetness of life, the sting of death, and the sheer goodness that lives in each and every one of us.
Genre: Drama, War
Director(s): Meg Ryan
Production: Playtone Pictures
  2 nominations.
 
IMDB:
5.5
Metacritic:
36
Rotten Tomatoes:
13%
PG
Year:
2015
96 min
217 Views


Mr. Grogan.

Mr. Grogan, there's a telegram!

They're calling you! Wake up!

- Ah!

Coffee. Corbett's!

- Mr. Corbett, I need

a cup of coffee right now.

It's for Mr. Grogan.

- Sure.

No, it's alright.

No charge, boy.

- Thanks.

- That's right, that's right,

that's right! Don't be afraid.

That's exactly right.

That's what I told you.

It's exactly right.

Corbett's coffee.

- Is it... an important

telegram?

- No.

It's most unimportant.

Ah, the accumulation of money,

business.

Seeing it takes a few weeks

for the important ones

to get here.

It's a night letter,

but you won't have

to deliver it tonight.

It's most unimportant.

But very important

for me to receive it.

They wanna... replace me.

They've been wanting

to retire me for years,

bring in machines, teletypes.

Machines instead

of human beings.

- Yes, sir.

- I knew I could count on you,

homer. I just knew it.

You've already been

a great help to me.

You know...

You've come to work

just in time.

I used to be the fastest

telegrapher in the world.

Faster than Wolinsky.

Sending, receiving,

receiving, sending...

And no mistakes. No mistakes!

Yeah.

Willie Grogan.

Everybody in the world,

every operator in the world

knew that...

Knew that name.

And I... pfft. Well...

You and me, homer,

we're still alive.

We are.

Mm. Ah...

I should like to say just a word

to the women in the country

tonight.

I have a boy at sea

on a destroyer.

For all I know, he may be

on his way to the pacific.

Two of my children are

in coast cities on the pacific.

Many of you

all over this country

have boys in the services

who will now be called upon

to go into action.

You have friends and families

in what has suddenly become

a danger zone.

- Everything's alright, ma.

I don't want you to sit up

this way. Everything's alright.

I had to deliver a telegram...

To a lady over on G street.

It said her son's dead.

She wouldn't believe it.

And when I got back

to the office,

the old telegraph

operator was drunk.

He has to do his work,

or they'll put him on a pension.

- Everything's alright, homer.

It's only that you are becoming

aware

of a world

in which you've been a child.

- I don't know what's happening.

Or why.

But no matter what...

I won't let anything hurt you

that way.

- Dear homer, you are now

the man of the Macauley family.

So everything I have at home

is yours.

My books, my phonograph,

my microscope.

I miss you, of course,

and I think about you

all the time.

I think about our father,

who died so recently

and yet so long ago.

His goodness... somehow...

Still with us.

- Ah, knock it off.

- His death is not an easy

thing to understand.

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Erik Jendresen

Erik Jendresen is an author as well as a writer and producer for plays, television, and film.As co-creator, lead writer and a supervising producer of the critically acclaimed mini-series Band of Brothers for HBO in 2001, Jendresen was one of the recipients of that year's Emmy Award for "Outstanding Miniseries", which he shared with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, among others. Jendresen also shared an Emmy nomination for that show in the category of "Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special". The show also resulted in a Golden Globe Award for "Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television", and 20 other awards, including the Peabody Award. As a writer/ producer for film, his current projects include The Mariner (directed by Christopher McQuarrie for FOX); Mission: Blacklist (directed by Rodrigo Cortés); Saint-Ex (directed by Christopher McQuarrie); Aloft (starring Robert Redford); Solo (directed by Antonio Banderas); and an adaptation of Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth (directed by David Slade). Earlier film projects include Star Trek: The Beginning (Paramount), Sublime, starring Tom Cavanagh and Kathleen York, Otis and The Big Bang (starring Antonio Banderas and Sam Elliott), and Ithaca - an adaptation of William Saroyan's The Human Comedy (directed by Meg Ryan and starring Sam Shepard and Hamish Linklater). As a writer, producer, and showrunner for television, his current projects include Special, a series based on the documentary filmmakers of the 1960s (with Marti Noxon, for the National Geographic Channel); a series based on the stories of the French Foreign Legion (with Thomas Bidegain and Dimitri Rassam); The War, a five-season series about the unending interconnected conflicts of the 20th century (with Christopher McQuarrie); The 43, a six-hour mini-series about WWII British ex-servicemen fighting fascism on their home soil (BBC/NBC); A Coloured Man's Reminiscences, an eight-hour miniseries chronicling the story of James Madison’s slave, Paul Jennings (with Tyger Williams and Rodrigo Garcia, for ABC); Castner's Cutthroats, a six-hour miniseries about the Battle of the Aleutians (Discovery Channel); Rocket Men, a ten-hour miniseries about Wernher von Braun and the men who took us to the moon and beyond; Climb to Conquer, a ten-hour miniseries about the 10th Mountain Division in World War II (with Wildwood); and Shot All to Hell, a four-hour miniseries about the James-Younger Gang and the Northfield, Minnesota, raid (TNT). Previous projects include Killing Lincoln, co-produced with Tony and Ridley Scott for the National Geographic Channel; a series based on the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Conversation (with Christopher McQuarrie); The Pony Express (with Robert Duvall); an eight-hour adaptation of Gregory Maguire's novel, Wicked (ABC); an eight-hour miniseries Majestic-12; and The Command - a series set in the world of the Joint Special Operations Command (FIC). Jendresen also has to his credit several books, most of which deal with the socio-anthropology of Peru and the Amazon Basin, including Dance of the Four Winds and its sequel, Island of the Sun (both based upon the journals of and co-written with Alberto Villoldo), and the children's book, The First Story Ever Told (also with Villoldo). Hanuman (with Joshua M. Greene, and Li Ming) is a re-telling for children of a portion of the Ramayana. He is also a playwright (The Killing of Michael Malloy, Excuse My Dust, Malice Aforethought). Jendresen lives in Sausalito, California, aboard the M.V. Hindeloopen, 112-year-old riveted wrought iron vessel which saw service during the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. He is married to Venus Madora Aslee Bobis, Program Director of the Partial Hospitalization Program at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California, San Francisco, and his partner in Pilothouse Pictures. He is an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. more…

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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