Tag Archives: Bennington

The Bennington Project: Episode 3 – An Alley Along Melrose

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Cast from the film version of Less Than Zero –  Andrew McCarthy as Clay, Jami Gertz as Blair, and Robert Downey Jr. as Julian.

Episode three of the podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, is titled An Alley Along Melrose, and it focuses on Bret’s exposure to the seamier side of Hollywood, courtesy of another Buckley schoolmate, Dominic Gross. Dominic is described as a ‘Richard Gere lookalike’ with a surfer edge.

Dominic’s Hollywood is down-market compared to Julie’s. The movie stars in it are movie stars on the slide and not-quite-yet movie stars, and the sex partners of movie stars on the slide and not-quite-yet movie stars. But it’s younger, wilder, and far more titillating… Continue reading →

The Bennington Project: Episode 2 – Bret Ellis, Valley Boy

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Episode two of the podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, is titled Bret Ellis, Valley Boy, and it focuses on the city of Los Angeles in the 1980s, and how it provided the setting for Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero. Continue reading →

The Bennington Project: Episode 1 – Dis-Orientation

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‘…what Café du Dôme was to the Lost Generation, the dining hall at Bennington College was to the lost generation revisited, otherwise known as Generation X. … And while, of course, southwestern Vermont wasn’t Paris, somehow, in the early-to-mid eighties, it was just as sly, louche, low-down, and darkly perdu… Seated around the table, berets swapped for Wayfarers and ready to gorge on the conversation if not the food (cocaine, the Pernod of its era, is a notorious appetite suppressant), were Bret Easton Ellis, future writer of American Psycho and co-leader of the literary Brat Pack, Jonathan Lethem, future writer of Fortress of Solitude and MacArthur genius, and Donna Tartt, future writer of The Secret History and Pulitzer Prize winner. All three were in Bennington’s class of 1986. …  All three were, at various times, infatuated and disappointed with one another. Their friendships stimulated and fueled by rivalry, as much as affection. And all three would mythologize Bennington in their fiction…’

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