Staying Gold by Danny Boy O'Conner and Jimmie Tramel
I'm not seeing a whole lot of people talking about the self proclaimed "definitive oral history of the 1967 novel for teens".
I just finished it and, I don't mean to be ungrateful, but I have to admit a certain level of disappointment. I appreciate it for what it is and the amount of stories that it shares from people who were in Tulsa and involved in the filming of the movie. It really did give you a sense of how important and influential this book (and film) was on this community.
But anything outside of the movie bits seemed (to me) half hearted.
When I preordered, I really hoped that we'd get an in-depth look at the creation of The Outsiders novel. Danny Boy has access to Susie Hinton. The way he shows it, they are downright friendly. And if he's going to go through all the effort to write a book about the making of The Outsiders, I wish he'd have gone all-in about all of it. Instead we get a handful of pages that do nothing more than gloss over its creation. "Susie was a teenager, she wrote it for school, yadda yadda."
The only section that got even less written about was about the television series, which is understandable because a lot of people either don't know about it or don't want to talk about it.
They go a little more in-depth on the Musical, which I guess it interesting. They do briefly talk about the changes they made to Dally and we received a glimpse into the reasoning behind changing his death from death-by-cop to suicide-by-train. (still a bad decision, imo...)
I'm not saying that I didn't walk away with any new knowledge. For instance, I didn't know that Tommy Howell had been emancipated in order to work on the film more freely. And the stories from the locals are really special and totally show you what it was like to be there when it was all happening.
But as someone who enjoys the book more than the film, I found the information lacking.
In the end, I gave it a 3/5.
Also, I don't know where to put this, but I read the hardcover version and all the photographs included were way too dark to be readable. Maybe they assumed most people would be reading this via tablet or Kindle. But with the assumption that this book was primarily made to be sold in the gift shop of the Outsiders House Museum, I cannot believe someone along the process didn't look at a proof or ARC and bring up how muddy most of the photos are.
