Michael Chabon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

John Carter of Mars news always seems to fly under the radar, and this delightful little blurb was no exception. Hidden in a Deadline Hollywood Daily post about Michael Chabon switching agencies was far more interesting little footnote that he was now writing the script for Andrew Stanton's Mars.

The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay (a very dedicated Chabon fansite) decided to just do the obvious and ask the man himself. Surprise! It's true: "I've been hired to do some revisions to an already strong script by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews. I wrote my original screenplay The Martian Agent back in 1995 because I wished I could do [Edgar Rice] Burroughs's Barsoom. So this is pretty much a dream come true for me."

Back in January, Stanton was pretty candid about how difficult the story was to adapt, but insisted they were past the writing stage, and into pre-production and casting. Clearly they've backtracked a little, but can anyone really be worried that they've stopped work to bring on Michael Chabon? This is a win-win situation all around, particularly since Chabon still hasn't managed to see any more of his work on the big screen. If John Carter spawns a Kavalier and Clay film, how happy the world will be!

By: Scott Weinberg (from his 2008 Sundance Festival review)

Most directors' first effort is NOT a huge blockbuster smash of a comedy starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn, but that's how writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber hit the scene: with Dodgeball. But based on the filmmaker's second effort, I'm guessing that Thurber took a lot of good-natured ribbing from his film-school friends and decided to snag some "indie cred" by doing a smaller movie for his second feature. That's all well and good, but it's too bad that the resulting movie -- The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- is such an inert, episodic, and familiar piece of very typical festival fare. It's as if Mr. Thurber watched six Sundance films at random, and then just copied his favorite scenes from each one.

Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about the son of an infamous gangster who spends his last summer before "adult life" roaming around with two "free-spirited" pals. The year is 1983, and young Art Bechstein (Jon Foster) is at a serious crossroads. Completely opposed to his father's lifestyle, Art (reluctantly) plans to become a stockbroker in a few months' time -- but that means a few open months in which he can A) work at a chintzy discount book store, B) cast lovesick glances towards his new friend Jane (Sienna Miller), and C) become close pals with a bisexual street thug called Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard). Oh, and D) nail his slightly unhinged boss (Mena Suvari).

Well nobody can deny that it has been a good year for the Coens. With awards and honors flying fast and furious for their adaptation of No Country for Old Men, the brothers have lined up their next literary adaptation. Variety reports that the Coens have purchased the screen rights to Michael Chabon's novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union for Columbia Pictures.

Chabon's award-winning novel is a detective story set in an alternate history. In the events following World War II, a temporary Yiddish-speaking settlement for Jewish refugees is established in Alaska in 1941. The story also incorporates the (fictional) destruction of the State of Israel in 1948 after an unsuccessful struggle for independence. Chabon's story focuses on "...a contemporary scenario where Jewish settlers are about to be displaced by U.S. government's plans to turn the frozen locale of Sitka, Alaska, over to Alaskan natives. Against this backdrop is a noir-style murder mystery in which a rogue cop investigates the killing of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who might be the messiah."

The Coens will be working with super-producer Scott Rudin on the film. Rudin has already developed three other books from Chabon; the first was Wonder Boys back in 2000, and Rudin is also developing an adaptation of Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which Chabon scripted for Paramount. The Coens will get to work on Union just as soon as they have finished shooting the dark comedy A Serious Man. So there is still plenty of time if you are one of those people who'd like to read the book first.

Most directors' first effort is NOT a huge blockbuster smash of a comedy starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn, but that's how writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber hit the scene: with Dodgeball. But based on the filmmaker's second effort, I'm guessing that Thurber took a lot of good-natured ribbing from his film-school friends and decided to snag some "indie cred" by doing a smaller movie for his second feature. That's all well and good, but it's too bad that the resulting movie -- The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- is such an inert, episodic, and familiar piece of very typical festival fare. It's as if Mr. Thurber watched six Sundance films at random, and then just copied his favorite scenes from each one.

Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about the son of an infamous gangster who spends his last summer before "adult life" roaming around with two "free-spirited" pals. The year is 1983, and young Art Bechstein (Jon Foster) is at a serious crossroads. Completely opposed to his father's lifestyle, Art (reluctantly) plans to become a stockbroker in a few months' time -- but that means a few open months in which he can A) work at a chintzy discount book store, B) cast lovesick glances towards his new friend Jane (Sienna Miller), and C) become close pals with a bisexual street thug called Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard). Oh, and D) nail his slightly unhinged boss (Mena Suvari).

If you're a fan of Michael Chabon's writing, you've no doubt read his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The book tells the tale of Sam Klayman, "little man, city boy and Jew", and his cousin, Josef Kavalier, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. The two create a comic-book character called "The Escapist", a superhero who, through the pen of Joe Kavalier, takes on Hitler through the evil Iron Chain and their leader, Attila Haxoff. The story has golems, magic, comic books, miraculous escapes, and romance. What more could you want in a great story?

The movie adaptation of Kavalier and Clay has been listed on IMDb as being in "pre-production" forever and a day now, and a couple weeks ago, as Erik noted, Michael Chabon himself wrote an update on his website, indicating that the project will be green-lighted -- or not -- at a meeting "on or around 12 July 2006". Chabon also reported that Natalie Portman is a "strong likelihood" for the coveted part of Rosa Saks (the woman around whom the aforementioned "romance" swirls), that other casting is ongoing, and that animation tests are being run for the comic books sequences. Chabon also lists some "quick answers" that will only make sense to fans of the book: "Golem: yes. Antarctica: yes. Gay love story: yes. Ruins of World's Fair: no. Long Island: no. Orson Welles: no. Salvador Dali: yes. Loving reference to Betty and Veronica: no. Stan Lee: no."

Today I checked in on Chabon's website, and found some rather cryptic updates on Kavalier and Clay and another project that Chabon has been working, on Snow and the Seven:

Kavalier and Clay: Status: Complying With Polite Request To Stop Posting About It On This Website, Already.

Snow and the Seven: "They love you, but they want to go in another direction." "What kind of dir--" "More of a fun direction." "Oh."

I was unable to find any further info in culling the usual sites for Chabon updates, so I went straight to the source -- or the next best thing -- Chabon's wife, author Ayelet Waldman, who confirmed that Chabon has been replaced on Snow, although it's not clear with whom, and that Kavalier and Clay "has not been greenlit." Bummer on both counts. On the bright side, though, Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about to start principal photography in Pittsburgh, and "not yet been greenlit" is not quite the same as "dead in the water," so here's hoping that Kavalier and Clay will eventually get made, and made right.

A few month ago, we reported the exciting news that a film version of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was in the works. (For those of you not familiar with the book, it's a coming-of-age story set in Pittsburgh during the 1980s, and focuses on Art Bechstein and the unconventional group of friends he makes during his last summer "of his youth.") At that time, Sienna Miller, Peter Sarsgaard and Max Minghella were already signed to star in the film, with Minghella playing Bechstein. It looks, however, as if things have changed: Production Weekly is reporting that Jon Foster (known primarily for his work on NBC's summer series Windfall, and a starring role in Stay Alive) is now playing Bechstein, and there's no indication of what might have happened to Minghella. The PW story also reveals that Mena Suvari has joined the cast in the role of Phlox, a "worldly, exotic, and slightly eccentric" member of Bechstein's posse.

The movie is slated to go into production in early September under the direction of screenwriter Rawson Marshall Thurber.

As Martha reported last month, Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh is finally slated for production, and already there's controversy. The book, Chabon's debut novel, is a coming-of-age story, and while it lacks the polish and near-perfection of Chabon's later works, especially Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it's still an engaging little tale, brimming with the promise of Chabon's potential as a storyteller.

Now that the film is actually in pre-production, there was the little matter to sort out of where to film. One might think, since the title is Mysteries of Pittsburgh, that Pittsburgh would be the obvious location for the shoot. Pittsburgh City Councilman Doug Shields, however, is accusing Pittsburgh Film Office Exec Director Dawn Keezer of encouraging the producers of Mysteries to shoot the film in Los Angeles instead.

Why, one might rightly ask, would someone whose job is ostensibly to support filmmakers in shooting films in Pittsburgh be encouraging filmmakers to shoot in Los Angeles? Apparently, the Board of the Pittsburgh Film Office voted last week to allow Keezer to relocate her position (largely funded by the taxpayers of the state of Pennsylvania) to Los Angeles, so she can marry her boyfriend. Not that that's the sole reason why Keezer would encourage filmmakers to film outside of Pittsburgh, but it does seem a little odd that the exec director of an office promoting filmmaking in a specific city would be pushing for a film to shoot elsewhere. Fortunately, the producers of Mysteries decided to ignore her advice and, the shoot is set for Pittsburgh anyhow.

The film is being helmed by Dodgeball director Rawson Marshall Thurber, and cast at this point includes Max Minghella (Art School Confidential, Syriana) as the story's protagonist, Art Bechstein, along with Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard.

[via The Amazing Website of Kavalier and Clay]

Over at her Risky Biz Blog, the ever-on-top-of-things Anne Thompson has a great write-up on the indulgent spending of Hollywood studios on films like Superman Returns, X Men: 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Thompson loves the FX, but hates the over-spending on cool effects extravaganzas at the expense of solid execution. If you're really into reading lots of detail on the FX, stuff, though, Thompson also has a really good piece on all the digital effects that went into making Bryan Singer's vision of Superman come to life. Bottom line, though: Thompson bemoans the huge box office returns on these flicks, because they just encourage studios to keep cranking out more of the same-old, same-old.

If you're a fan of comic-book movies, you probably already know that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon had a hand in the screen story for one of my fave films, Spider-Man 2 . And if you're a fan of Chabon, you already know that the man is a huge comic fanboy. What you may not know is that Chabon, prior to the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (the book for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature), pitched studios for both Fantastic Four and X-Men -- and was turned down.

The ever-self-effacing Chabon (who even lists on his website a bunch of negative pull-quotes about his work) has a couple of essays on his website about his unsuccessful pitches. In "Maybe Not So Much With the Fantastic", he details his unsuccessful pitch meeting with Chris Columbus' 1492 Productions (at which he laughed along with the execs about fanboys who came in to pitch their take on the film with their Fantastic Four comics in hand -- while his own copy of FF #48  -- "The Coming of Galactus!" -- hid quietly in his own briefcase). He also includes his pitch notes, which give you an idea of the direction he would have taken the film. Whether you liked Fantastic Four or thought it was a galactic pile of crap, it's interesting to read what Chabon might have done with the story, especially the villian element.

 

Michael Chabon is in the news again. Last week, Erik reported that Natalie Portman was considering a role in the screen version of Chabon's mindblowingly wonderful The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (for fans of the book, Chabon himself offers a great update on the movie over at his blog, including what elements of his work will be included, and which have been cut from the screenplay), and now Production Weekly is reporting that the cast is in place for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which is based on Chabon's first novel. Set to star in the film, a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Pittsburgh, are Sienna Miller, Peter Sarsgaard, and Max Minghella. The novel focuses on Art Bechstein (to be played by Minghella), and the group of friends he meets during "the last summer of [his] youth." Among the group are "the witty and beautiful Arthur Lecomte [uncast], "the equally stunning Jane (Miller), her boyfriend, the legendary Cleveland (Sarsgaard), and worldly, exotic, and slightly eccentric Phlox [also uncast]." Whoa. So, if nothing else, this is going to be a damn pretty movie.

One of the main concerns of the novel seems to be sexual identity; it'll be interesting to see in what direction screenwriter-director Rawson Marshall Thurber takes the film. (Personally, I'm immediately prejudiced against him because he's wearing a Manchester United jersey in his IMDb photo.) Production begins next month in Pittsburgh; the film is due out in 2007.