“You want to be inspired by the book, not enslaved to it.” “The key is going after the essence of the characters and then letting the plot go where it needs to go to illuminate the essence of those characters,” Hanson says. “Most adaptations are approached as condensations, as opposed to the bolder approach of starting over,” says Hanson, who won an Oscar in 1997, with writing partner Brian Helgeland, for his adaptation of James Ellroy’s crime noir “L.A. Because it’s a wonderful book and he’s an extraordinary writer.” “I did think about halfway through ‘Wonder Boys’ that next time I’m going to take a really inferior piece of literature and look like a hero because the only thing I can do here is fail. Often the men in my movies are reticent it’s their behavior and the occasional word they drop that is revealing. You have to find other ways to do it in screenwriting. “You have to end up externalizing the life of, say, Jack Baker,” Kloves says of the battered lounge-pianist hero (played by Jeff Bridges) of “The Fabulous Baker Boys.” “You could easily evoke what’s going on inside Jack Baker in a novel-not easily, but the tools are there. Prose fiction goes inside the characters’ heads. So you have to find a way to bring that voice into the screenplay and onto the screen.” Kloves doesn’t agree with this, but says, “The danger of a good book is that it is the voice of the author, and the language and his or her craft is what’s making it evocative, and, absent that, when you put it on the screen it just won’t work. But the themes of the movie apply to all of us, in that we’re all looking backward and forward in our lives, trying to figure out who we want to be, what our purpose is, and how to retain a sense of renewal.”īut how to get Chabon’s 368-page comic novel into the form of a two-hour film? Certainly the video stores are well-stocked with literary adaptations that either didn’t scream to be films or screamed after being made into films-titles like “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Angela’s Ashes,” “Beloved,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Texasville” and the recent “All the Pretty Horses.”Ī shibboleth in Hollywood holds that good movies are made from bad books and vice versa. Had this been a movie just about a writer, I don’t think I would have wanted to do it. “What a writer does doesn’t translate that easily. “Movies about writers are usually not very good,” says director Hanson. “I thought that’s what made it entertaining and dramatic. I embraced the ‘shaggy dog’ aspect of it,” he says, referring to the story’s rambling, loose-jointed structure. “I am one of those who subscribes to the theory that character is plot. “Anyone who’s seen my work knows that I’m clearly more obsessed with character than plot,” says Kloves one morning, seated in the courtyard of Dutton’s Brentwood and sipping a tall latte. is Grady’s flamboyant, gay editor and Frances McDormand is the college chancellor with whom Grady is having an affair. Tobey Maguire plays Grady’s talented but morose and sexually ambivalent student James Leer Robert Downey Jr. Starring Michael Douglas as writer Grady Tripp, who published a first novel to great success and seven years later is still trying to produce his second, “Wonder Boys” is about staying in the game of life when you’ve peaked early, about living up to others’ expectations. “I always thought it was a movie from the minute I read it,” says Kloves, 41, who had written only original screenplays and turned down numerous adaptation jobs before producer Scott Rudin sent him galleys of “Wonder Boys.” “It’s curious because then I would run into people after the book was published, and they would say, ‘I don’t see how in hell this is a movie.’ But it probably goes back to having cut my teeth as an audience member on the movies of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, because it was clearly in that bag for me.” Its hero, if he can be called that, is beset by personal and professional failures, revealed in bits of dark comedy as he meanders through a literary festival weekend at a small college. Written in the sparkling prose that has elevated Chabon to the top shelf of American letters, the book was nevertheless hardly a natural for Hollywood. It is, in fact, a novel about a novelist and his best student. In the parlance of the marketplace, “Wonder Boys” is “literary” fiction (or, in Hollywood-speak, “nongenre”)-that is, a novel not about spies, submarines, serial murderers, the supernatural or the stock market.
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