Joe Gould's Secret

Around 1940, the New Yorker writer Joe Mitchell meets Joe Gould, one of the familiar figures of Greenwich Village. Gould cadges meals, drinks and contributions to the Joe Gould Fund, and says he has been writing an enormous text called An Oral History of the World, twenty thousand conversations taken down. This Harvard graduate fascinates Mitchell, who writes him up in 1942 under the title Professor Seagull, and the piece brings Gould a measure of fame. But Gould’s prickliness and his habit of dropping in on Mitchell for hours of talk break the two of them apart; they stay in touch until his death all the same, and Mitchell writes the secret afterwards. Stanley Tucci made the film from Joseph Mitchell’s actual pieces, with a screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, and played Mitchell himself; Ian Holm plays Gould. What the secret was is not written here.