Shane Salerno, an action film writer whose credits include Armageddon, previewed at the recent Cannes Film Festival a glimpse of his new documentary about J.D. Salinger, which will be released this September. The documentary, nine years in the making, features a plethora of interviews from writers Tom Wolfe and the late Gore Vidal as well as high-profile actors Martin Sheen, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, and Danny DeVito. The film is rumored to provide information about what was found in Salinger’s legendary secret vault, said to contain forty-five years of unpublished writings. Also in the documentary, a plethora of interviews with writers such as Tom Wolfe and the late Gore Vidal as well as actors Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, and Martin Sheen, who all discuss Salinger’s influence on their work and the broader culture. The film purports to include interviews with Salinger's closest friends and colleagues who have never before gone on-the-record about the famously reclusive writer.

The Cannes preview hinted at revelations about the writer after he withdrew from pubic life to seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire in 1965. Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Company is releasing the movie, when asked about such disclosures, answered: “It depends how you define a great revelation. I hope the audience will keep the secret of the film, and won't tell their neighbors, just like they did for The Crying Game. If I told you what it was they'd kill me.”

J.D. Salinger was born in New York City in 1919 and died of natural causes in Cornish New Hampshire in 2010 at the age of 91. Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide and remains his only published novel.

Links: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/movies/salinger-a-documentary-film.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 , http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/JD-Salinger-documentary-coming-this-fall.html