Justin Bozung
Film writer and researcher; editor of The Cinema of Norman Mailer: Film Is Like Death (2017), creator and host of The Norman Mailer Society Podcast (2015–2018), and a Norman Mailer Society Board member from 2015 to 2023.
Justin Bozung is a freelance film writer and researcher who has also worked as a part-time archivist. He has written for Fangoria, Paracinema, Bijou, Videoscope, and Shock Cinema, and he has collaborated on books about Stanley Kubrick (contributor notes, The Mailer Review 9, 2015, and 10, 2016; MailerConf16 biographies).
Mailer’s films
Bozung’s main work on Mailer is The Cinema of Norman Mailer: Film Is Like Death (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), a collection he edited. It gathers new and reprinted essays on Mailer’s films together with Mailer’s own writing on film, including “Some Dirt in the Talk” and “A Course in Film-Making.” Among the contributors are Maggie McKinley, David Sterritt, Michael Ventura, and Michael Mailer (Bozung 2017; Bibliography 2017). Before publication it was announced as Norman Mailer: Film Is Like Death (A Cinema Reader). Gerald R. Lucas reviewed it in The Mailer Review 11 (2017) as “Lost Islands of the Mind.” Bozung later wrote the “Film” chapter of McKinley’s Norman Mailer in Context (2021).
He has also written for The Mailer Review: “The American Antonioni” (2015), on the films; “Norman Mailer’s Dark Forces” (2016); and “Mailer De Facto: How Norman Mailer Saved Barney Rosset” (2018), a review of Rosset, the memoir of Barney Rosset. He was also the interviewer for Daniele Pantano’s “MAILER FOLEY 4:10” (2015) (Bibliography 2015; Bibliography 2016; Bibliography 2018). He and Lennon were consultants on the Mailer documentary How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer (Society news, Oct. 2023).
The printed table of contents and abstracts of The Mailer Review 9 (2015) give the author of “The American Antonioni” as “Jacques Bozung.” The article’s byline, running heads, and contributor note all read Justin. This edition’s 2015 register still carries the misprint.
The Society podcast
Bozung created and hosted The Norman Mailer Society Podcast, which ran to 55 episodes between February 2015 and 2018. It mixed rare recordings of Mailer with interviews with people who knew and studied him, beginning with J. Michael Lennon. Every episode is preserved at the Internet Archive (The Norman Mailer Society Podcast). By the 2016 business meeting it had reached forty episodes and was “highly recommended” (2016 minutes).
In the Society
In October 2015 the members elected Bozung to the Norman Mailer Society‘s Executive Board, in the seat left by Barry Leeds (2015 minutes). He was re-elected in 2016 and 2019. By the April 2023 business meeting he had stepped down from the Board (2023 minutes). At the 2015 Provincetown conference he spoke on panels on researching Mailer, Wild 90, “The Digital Mailer,” and the film of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and he read in the staged reading of the novel. At Long Branch in 2016 he spoke on Mailer’s marijuana journal and on Mailer and Picasso (conference programs). In 2017 the treasurer, David Light, counted him among those whose “ongoing guidance” would carry the Society forward (A Message from David Light).
Related pages
- Norman Mailer Society | Norman Mailer in Context | How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer | Bibliography 2017 | Maggie McKinley