Motherless Brooklyn Costume Designer Amy Roth’s Period Perfect Detail

Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn takes the spirit, and many of the characters, from Jonathan Lethem’s excellent 1999 novel of the same name, but from there goes in an entirely new direction. That direction included setting the film some 45-years earlier, in the mid-1950s New York. 

Lethem’s most indelible character, a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel, remains (played by Norton), but the setting, story, and stakes are all different.

Motherless Brooklyn Production Designer Beth Mickle on Bringing Back Old New York

Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is a hugely ambitious adaptation of the seminal 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem. While it borrows heavily from Lethem’s huge cast of characters—a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel (played by Norton himself) and the folks he calls friends and foes alike—it charts its own path with a more or less completely original story. The era is no longer the late 90s but rather the 1950s New York.

Edward Norton on Redefining Heroism in Motherless Brooklyn

Edward Norton brought Motherless Brooklyn, his long-gestating passion project, to the Motion Picture Association’s brand new theater last night for a special screening and Q&A moderated by professor Yanick Lamb, Director of Media Studies at Howard University. Norton’s film, which explores institutional racism built into the very foundations of New York City, was inspired as much by Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of “master builder” Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,”

Edward Norton is a Detective With Tourette’s in First Motherless Brooklyn Trailer

As Heinz Ketchup told us in their ubiquitous ad campaigns of yesteryear, good things come to those who wait. Behold, the first trailer for Edward Norton’s two-decades-in-the-making Motherless Brooklyn, which he adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel. Norton is not only the writer/director but also stars as Lionel Essrog, a private detective in 1950s New York with Tourette’s syndrome. Essrog is thrust into a major case when his mentor and only friend,