captain mauzner Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means -- time for The Write Stuff! This week Cinematical spoke with screenwriter Captain Mauzner. Mauzner has an interesting perspective on screenwriting because he's written two major films based on true events and actual people. He co-wrote 2003's Wonderland -- the story of the infamous "Wonderland Murders," which starred Val Kilmer as legendary porn star John Holmes. And he wrote last year's Factory Girl, the tale of Edie Sedgwick (played by Sienna Miller), Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce), and a Dylanesque "Musician" played by Hayden Christensen. We spoke about Mauzner's scripts, process, and the trickiness of writing scripts based on fact.

Cinematical: Are you working on anything right now?

Captain Mauzner: I am working on something right now, yeah. I'm adapting a book. It's a small book, it's called The Food Chain, by Geoff Nicholson. A friend of mine runs a small company and I'm adapting it with the hopes of directing it. It's kind of about food, sex, and cannibalism. Revenge, food, sex, and cannibalism.

Cinematical: Well, alright!

CM: It's a little dark comedy. It's fun. And what was nice about it was -- I've written so many things and a lot of them are true life stories, and they all seem to be about kind of deplorable human beings. And I think that my comfort zone is really kind of in the dark side -- the drug addicts, the deviants. And I think that as I've kind of gotten older and left that world myself, I guess you could say I've become less and less interested in it. You see these movies like Wonderland and Factory Girl and you could say "oh, they're like an argument against doing drugs." But I know for myself, there's always a glamorizing element to it. And as much as you want to say this is the downfall of these people, which it is -- and obviously there's nothing glamorous about the drug lifestyle, or the party lifestyle because it does lead to bad things. But just the act of writing about it or making these the main characters or trying to explain these people, I feel like that somewhat glamorizes it, or at least in my mind it was very glamorous. I had a very romantic notion, at like 14-years-old I discovered Bukowski and I was kind of off to the races. So I think that as I get older I'm ready to move on to maybe something light and happy. My family's always like "Why can't you write something that we can take Grandma to?"

Cinematical: So do you find when you're writing about drugs and debauchery, that you're not looking to condemn it and point a finger, you're just looking to present it and let the audience decide?

CM: Absolutely. I'm not looking to condemn it at all. I'm not looking to be moral about it. I believe in experimentation. I believe in doing kind of what you want and not having anybody else tell you what to do. I think that my fascination with it is always the "why." Why do people do this? I think that's kind of the fun of being able to do those kind of things is that you can live kind of vicariously through these people, and try to figure out the "why" without being judgmental.

There's something in the June air -- we've got a million and two projects gearing up to bring books to the big screen. However, this one is definitely in a league of its own. The word over at Variety is that Occupant Films has bought the feature rights to a little book called The Food Chain, by British author Geoff Nicholson. Don't let the run-of-the-mill title fool you (although I wonder if it could have some kinky truth to it), it's much more than a project about food. It sounds like Big Night meets Shortbus. And yes, I mean John Cameron Mitchell's recent kinkfest.

First, let's get the particulars out of the way -- the book will be adapted by Captain Mauzner and James Townsend. Mauzner's inclusion bodes well for the task -- his two writing credits are Wonderland, which dipped him into the world of John Holmes, and Factory Girl, which had him immersed in the ways of Warhol. That's all that's been released about the production so far, so let's get onto the plot. Nicholson's novel is about a culinary family who created a big chain of family restaurants when their toddler son, Virgil, chewed on a chicken leg and became the "Golden Boy." When Virgil grows up, he's running his father's one trendy establishment in Los Angeles when he gets an invitation to the Everlasting Club. According to Booklist, "Its emblem is a snake swallowing its own tail, and its mission is to sustain a perpetual bacchanalia." (One that has been going on for 350 non-stop years, and has included epic figures from the past like the Marquis de Sade. Oy!) Somehow, the rest of his family gets "tangled up in the club's epicurean intrigue" and the book flirts with "the specter of cannibalism and the connection between consumption, power and sex." I'm not sure how it all fits together, and where the cannibalism comes in, but it sure seems like Shortbus paved the way for this -- unless it goes the Exit to Eden route and makes the sex a PG experience -- but I doubt Mauzner would let that happen.