Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana, the novelist, journalist, actor and film historian, not the Midwestern city, was born in 1950 in New England. He served as the art critic for the "Village Voice" weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana has published two short stories collections, "Scar Tissue" in 1987 and "White Trash Boulevard" in 1988, and multiple novels. His first novel, "Horse Crazy," was published in 1989, and his second, "Gone Tomorrow," came out in 1993. His third novel "Rent Boy" debuted in 1994, the same year that his play "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith" was filmed. His critical writings were collected in "Let It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995" (1996). In 1997, he delved into the 'true crime' genre with "Resentment: A Comedy," a heavily fictionalized retelling of Lyle and Erik Menendez's trial, followed by the straight non-fictional "Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story" in 1999. His novel "Depraved Indifference" (2002) is based on the: killers Sante and Kenneth Kimes, a mother-and-son duo who perpetrated fraud and murder. According to Indiana, he wrote the trilogy to answer the question: "Why is there evil in human nature, and where does it come from?" He believes the insanity of his murderers is rooted in American materialism. The three true crime books pointedly portray the media frenzy that accompanies murder cases in America as a kind of madness. His latest book, "The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contemp" (2005), holds that the electoral success of a mediocre, washed-up movie star with no political experience, who improbably became the governor of the state with the fifth largest economy in the world, is the result of this media madness, in which style matters more than substance, So acute is Indiana's critical facility, the UK newspaper "The Guardian" has labeled him "one of the most important chroniclers of the American psyche". For the British Film Institute's Modern Classics series, Indiana wrote a book-length essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini's film "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," Gary, Indiana also has acted in a movies, and as an actor, has appeared on stage in New York and London.