How the Screenwriter of Armageddon Produced a Never-Before-Seen J.D. Salinger Photo

Shane Salerno is best known for scripting films like Armageddon and Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, but deep down, he's a J.D. Salinger diehard -- that's why Salerno is directing a documentary about the Catcher in the Rye author and co-authoring a massive Salinger biography. Still, is exhuming this never-before-seen photograph of the famous recluse a proper tribute?

Newsweek provides some perspective on Salerno's interest, which produced that digitally restored 1968 photo:

Like Franny Glass, who clung to her copy of The Way of a Pilgrim as a kind of dog-eared talisman, Salerno has a spiritual relationship with Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He also has rules. "Do not read J. D. Salinger on a Kindle," he says, with a snort of disgust. "Grab that broken paperback."

Salerno's disdain for inauthenticity--if a Kindle counts as such--is more or less his mission statement for what he calls "the very definition of a passion project": writing, funding, and directing a two-hour documentary, Salinger, and an 800-page biography, The Private War of J. D. Salinger, co-written with David Shields. The pair of forthcoming works are as shrouded as their subject, but Salerno hopes they will be the definitive word on the writer. "We've been sifting through all this new material to contextualize this giant of American literature," he says of the 15,000 pages of interview transcripts and more than 100 personal photos he's amassed. "You're going to see a very different Salinger than you've read about for five decades." The Private War is arranged nonchronologically to help fill in the author's "missing" years, and Salerno says both projects boast a variety of first-evers in addition to the photo collection, including interviews with Salinger intimates and former New Yorker colleagues, some of whom had never spoken about "Jerry." "When you're sitting two feet from someone who hasn't spoken in five or six decades about this, there is just an electricity that surges through the room," Salerno says--though, of course, he won't name names.

Michael Bay wants the coverage for this project on his desk yesterday. Laetitia Casta as Joyce Maynard, anyone?

Salinger Like You've Never Seen Him [Newsweek]