The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

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While he thought the performances were really good—particularly DiCaprio and Wahlberg's—Carroll took issue with the movie's ending. "If they just ended with him staring out the window I think it would've worked. It would've been very literary. The way they re-shot it was kinda corny, so clean and everything." He also didn't agree with Kalvert's direction. "But the director was just a techno freak. He didn't have any literary sense at all." Johnson, Malcolm (April 21, 1995). "DiCaprio's Acting Rings True, But Grim 'Diaries' Feels Phony". Hartford Courant. Carroll has trouble adjusting to the strict etiquette at the new private school that he is attending on a basketball scholarship, but he impresses his classmates with his confidence and athletic ability. During a routine trip with his gym class to Central Park, Carroll almost gets caught smoking marijuana. He notes the futility of the school’s symbolic Thanksgiving fast for hunger. He describes a sexual encounter with a communist girl. As the movie opens, Jim ( Leonardo DiCaprio) is on the basketball team at St. Vitus High School in New York, where a perverted priest salivates while spanking naughty students with a big paddle and the rest of the class watches. This scene owes more to Victorian pornography than to any actual parochial school in 20th century America, but no matter: The message, I guess, is that the teachers are such hypocrites you might as well go out and destroy yourself. Carroll, Jim (1987). Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971-1973. New York City: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0140085020.

And as I sit here and type this review, I am still contemplating the last sentence of his diary. What does it mean? Was it his last confession? Did he know that his life was only going to get darker and decide that the reader was no longer invited on his journey? It was written in the summer of ’66 after Carrol had lost almost everything. “I just want to be pure…” he says. Is there such a thing as public good? That's all I'm asking. I mean, is your good the same as my good? I doubt that seriously. So, if we do not agree on a common sense of good, then how can there be any larger public good? Couch, Aaron (March 7, 2014). "Scott Kalvert, 'Basketball Diaries' Director, Dies at 49". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved June 20, 2020. While still in high school, Carroll published his first collection of poems, Organic Trains. Already attracting the attention of the local literati, his work began appearing in the Poetry Project's magazine The World in 1967. Soon his work was being published in elite literary magazines like Paris Review in 1968, [2] and Poetry the following year. In 1970, his second collection of poems, 4 Ups and 1 Down was published, and he started working for Andy Warhol. At first, he was writing film dialogue and inventing character names; later on, Carroll worked as the co-manager of Warhol's Theater. Carroll's first publication by a mainstream publisher (Grossman Publishers), the poetry collection Living at the Movies, was published in 1973. [8]As the diary progresses, Carrol begins to flirt more and more with H. Never buying at first, only using when others around him supply the deadly euphoric, Carrol begins a dance that starts off as a waltz but turns into a frenetic assemblage of hands and feet that no choreographer could put any semblance to. As the diary moves from year to year, Carrol’s decline becomes obvious as his basketball status slowly loses its luster. Folks know he has game, but they never know exactly what game is going to show up at any given time. Carroll has another classroom-shooting fantasy. He says his fear of atomic warfare has lessened but that he is still paranoid. He talks about his experiences during the National High School All Star Basketball Game, when he is groped by Benny Greenbaum, a homosexual college scout. Carroll explains his passion for writing about New York. Carroll describes what it is like shooting up and says that it is getting hard to concentrate on his writing. Carroll’s drug habit continues to affect his basketball performance. He talks about an older woman with whom he has been having an affair; the rich divorcée pays for his drug habit and in return she makes him engage in abnormal sexual acts. Carroll talks about a junkie friend who is in prison for two years. Carroll and a friend get swindled by a drug dealer. Carroll buys heroin from a new dealer and begins to like the vomiting that comes as a side effect. He finds out that one of his old friends is in prison for a drug-related murder. Carroll gets sent to Riker’s Island Juvenile Reformatory for three months for heroin possession. Carroll identified Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, [6] Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs as influences on his artistic career. [7] Writing [ edit ] Carroll describes how he hustles homosexuals for money, and he says that his hustles have gotten weird lately. He and several friends find a half-dead, naked woman who has committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Carroll describes the bathroom at Grand Central Terminal, where men from all walks of life go to look at other men and masturbate. He recalls the first time he saw transvestites naked, when he was about nine years old. He talks about his fear of atomic war. Carroll and his friends get high and steal food from a restaurant. He gets high on a train and becomes paranoid that the other passengers are going to throw him off. He gets a case of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, and goes to an underground doctor in Harlem to get a shot and some pills. He realizes that he is not in control of his growing heroin addiction, but he says that he better get in control if he wants to do well in school and basketball. Carroll was born to a working-class family of Irish descent, and grew up in New York City's Lower East Side. When he was about 11 (in the sixth grade) his family moved north to Inwood in Upper Manhattan. [2] He was taught by the LaSalle Christian Brothers. In fall 1963, he entered Rice High School in Harlem, but was soon awarded a scholarship to the elite Trinity School. [2] He attended Trinity from 1964 to 1968. [3]

a b c Mallon, Thomas (December 6, 2010). "Off the Rim: Jim Carroll's "The Petting Zoo" ". The New Yorker. New York City: Condé Nast. pp.90–93 . Retrieved December 27, 2010.However, the power of Jim Carroll’s autobiography lies in its stark portrayal of addiction’s brutal reality. Are we banning it from shielding adolescents from detrimental influences or a crucial life lesson? O'Hehir, Andrew (April 12, 1995). "A Poet Half-Devoured – Jim Carroll Feature Articles". CatholicBoy.com . Retrieved December 18, 2012. Despite these controversies, The Basketball Diaries remains an important literary work that provides a raw, unfiltered perspective on societal taboos and struggles. Life for Jim is a downward spiral of pills, cough medicine, booze, jumping off cliffs into the Harlem River, passing out during a game and masturbating under the stars (the movie heroically declines to score this scene with "Up on the Roof"). There are also exciting glimpses into the underworld of users, pushers, hookers and pimps, as Jim drifts loose from his secure moorings, while writing everything down in his diary. He hung out in Greenwich Village and went to a poetry reading with Carroll, basically living out Goluboff's fantasies. 7. THERE WAS A DRUG CONSULTANT ON SET.