Last night I watched Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. I was surprised by how well the spirit of the book and most of its great dialogue were preserved, and how beautiful the movie looked, and how seemingly unstructured (like the book) it was, and how good Alan Arkin is as Yossarian. There are a lot of great performances to go along with him, too, from Orson Welles to Martin Sheen to Bob Newhart to even Art Garfunkel.

Last week, Nichols, Robert Gottlieb (who edited the book) and writer Christopher Buckley (a close friend of Heller’s) all got together with Charlie Rose to talk about it here. This year is the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication. Open Culture also picked up on this here.