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Tom Wolfe Documentary Set for PBS

With Tom Wolfe’s new Miami-based novel, “Back to Blood” (Little, Brown), scheduled for release on Oct. 23, a new documentary about the 1951 Washington and Lee graduate will begin airing on Public Broadcasting Service stations later this month.

In “Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood,” former Miami Herald journalist Oscar Corral follows the author around Miami as he exhibits his journalistic style in researching the novel. The film shows Tom getting soaked by a random cannonballer at the annual Columbus Day regatta and pacing off the width of a bungalow’s backyard to make sure he gets the details just right.

Woven into the scenes of Tom out and about in Miami are interviews with Wolfe biographers and real-life Miami characters, including the former police chief and mayor.

A story about the documentary in Miami New Times describes it this way: ” ‘Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood’ relies on its subject alone to keep viewers engaged — there are no particularly artsy or dazzling feats of cinematography and no surprising revelations about either Miami or Wolfe.”

In an interview published this summer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tom had this to say about a central feature of “Back to Blood”: “Miami is the only city I can find in the whole world where people from another country, speaking another language and from another culture have taken over a vast city at the ballot box in one generation. I’m talking, of course, about Cubans.”

See the trailer for the documentary below:

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