Robert Pulcini Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Hearing that Kevin Kline is starring in a new film always sets off my alarm, eagerly hoping for something like The Anniversary Party or A Midsummer Night's Dream (and not Trade or The Pink Panther). And this just may be it... Variety reports that Klein, Paul Dano, John C. Reilly, and Katie Holmes have signed on for an adaptation of Jonathan Ames' The Extra Man. Shari Springer Berman wrote the script with Ames, and will direct along with American Splendor director Robert Pulcini.

The book follows a troubled young man (Dano) who gets a teaching job in New York City and ends up living with an "elderly eccentric" (Kline) who spends his time as "the extra man" for rich old women on the East Side. (Ouch. The thought of Kline as "elderly" truly saddens me...) While the old man teaches him some tidbits about city living, like how to sneak into Broadway plays, the younger roommate struggles with his uncertain sexual orientation with cross-dressing and forays into "New York's transvestite underworld."

There is no word on who Reilly or Holmes will play, but maybe one of the book's fans could shed some light on character possibilities? Not that it really matters -- just the thought of Kline, Dano, and Reilly together is enough to sell me, and I'm dying to see what Dano and Kline do with their roles. And who knows? Maybe this will mean a big comeback for Holmes as well (as a big-screen actress) -- she was wonderful in the last film she shared with Klein -- Ang Lee's The Ice Storm.

I've been told by a couple of people who've read The Nanny Diaries and seen the film that the latter is a pale, scrubbed imitation of the book -- to which I reply, 'when was that ever not the case?' I've never read The Nanny Diaries, but I enjoyed the film for what it was -- a jelly-lensed portrait of the awful egomania that exists in that biosphere known as the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Be warned -- this film rarely takes a step that's not telegraphed 20 minutes in advance, but that doesn't mean that the presentation isn't solid, the direction focused and precise, and the acting serviceable in the case of Scarlett Johansson and more so in the case of her two, older co-stars -- Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti, who reunites with his American Splendor team here. Linney and Giamatti play Mr. and Mrs. X -- the cheeky, pointless anonymity was granted to them in the book -- a couple of Manhattan blue-bloods who hire Johansson's naive student character as a live-in nanny for their young son, ridiculously named 'Grayer.'

Johansson meets Mrs. X in Central Park, when a slip of the tongue causes her to be swamped by dog-walking UES housewives who think they've happened upon the Rolls Royce of nanny applicants, as opposed to someone who 'barely speaks English,' as one mother complains in the film. She's soon moved into the house and is essentially performing the role of surrogate mother for the precocious Grayer while his mother attends to more pressing issues, like her husband's possible infidelity and finding the right Burberry jacket to put on. Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini handle this opening act of the film with ease, quickly getting us into the fun stuff without going too far in making Johansson's character a poor Cinderella or another far-out character archetype. Instead, she's just a typical college-aged kid who has absolutely no idea where she's going in the world and thinks she can put off the big decisions for a few more months with some easy nanny work. She doesn't realize she's essentially sold herself into indentured servitude.

The immensely popular 2002 novel The Nanny Diaries had two writers, so it's only fitting that the movie version has two directors. Husband and wife team, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who were Oscar-nominated for writing 2003's American Splendor, have adapted the book, which tells the story of a young woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, who puts off some major life decisions by deciding to take short-term work as a nanny in the rare air of Manhattan's Upper East Side, where housewives carry business cards, children are treated as well-groomed fashion accessories and the husbands are rarely seen. I recently had a chance to speak with Berman and Pulcini about the special challenges of bringing this book to life as a movie -- anyone who's read it knows that it's a very interior, non-cinematic tome that even goes so far as to withhold the names of key characters from the reader. (Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti are credited as Mrs. X and Mr. X in the film) Here's the interview.

RS: Is this a world that you have first-hand experience with, or just a good story that came your way?

SSB: Well, we live in New York City. We live on the West side, we live across Central Park from the Upper East Side, which is really close, but like, you need a passport to get there. It's a whole other universe away. So, in a weird way, we were familiar with the world, because we would walk around and see women dressed in Burberry jackets with little dogs in matching Burberry jackets. We would see the world, but we were outside observers. It wasn't a world that we were intimately included in.

RS: So when you sat down to adapt this popular book, how much freedom did you give yourself to take it in new places, to make it your own?

RP: Luckily, we had a lot of freedom, because there had been other writers on the project before us, and the studio had come to the decision that it wasn't the easiest book to adapt. Even though it was immensely popular, it was very interior. It was very much a catalog of great details and observations, you know. So how do you open that up, cinematically? So I think they kind of welcomed our approach, and I know the writers have seen the movie and they're very happy with what we've done with it.