We just got some really beautiful outtake photos from the Revolutionary Road, the first trailer was amazingly beautiful with Nina Simone bellowing in the background. Awards Daily were the first to get hold of these pictures. They have also got an excerpt about the book written by Richard Ford. Yates’ book was a cult classic with many people comparing it to some of the greatest books ever written. Ford writes

Yates – who was both famously decorous and famously plain-spoken – once remarked to an interviewer that he felt he had written too little in his life, and that his was the misfortune to have written his best book first. And although over his 30 years of public life as a writer Yates’s reputation rose, then fell, then rose again, ultimately distinguishing him as that ambiguous thing, a “writer’s writer,” one who does not make it (as did his contemporaries Cheever, Updike, Walker Percy) into the permanent, big-money main arena of American literary fashion, it is also true that nothing he wrote came near the achievement and acclaim of “Revolutionary Road,” which “lost” the 1961 National Book Award to Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer.”

He continues by saying

In 1961, “Revolutionary Road” must have seemed an especially corrosive indictment of the postwar suburban “solution,” and of the hopeful souls who followed its call out of the city in search of some acceptable balance between rough rural essentials and urban opportunity and buzz. Frank Wheeler, the novel’s principal character, is 29, already a combat veteran and a Columbia graduate and outwardly a man on the way up. Yet Yates depicts him sarcastically as a compromised, self-important “suit” with “the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise.” In the novel’s close notice Frank is a deluded, dissipated bore who imagines himself “as an intense, nicotinestained Jean-Paul-Sartre sort of man,” but is merely an adulterer spicing his talk with literary references while following work so stultifying and meaningless that he even laughs at himself.

Continue reading here

I just really hope if this book gets the right treatment from Sam Mendes who is directing the adaptation. The actors seem to be in full form this year so we really don’t need to worry about them.

Here are the pictures. Click the thumbnail to enlarge the images

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