Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Michael Chabon, in an instance of art imitating career, wrote most of the novel's first draft in a mere five months -- after laboring for five years on his own unfinished behemoth. "I invented a character who could take the mojo off and exorcise the specter of what was happening to me," he says. So when a movie producer began sniffing around for the rights to this highly personal book, Chabon says he was, "to be frank, curious. All along, a chain of individuals thought this could make a good movie. It became Scott Rudin's mission. Then he brought in Steve Kloves, and his script persuaded Hanson. At each step, I kept thinking, 'Why do these guys think this is going to work?' I mean, one of the things I thought going in was that no major Hollywood star would want to be part of it. I was never persuaded that it would happen until Michael Douglas said he would play the major part."
Kloves, who wrote and directed "The Fabulous Baker Boys" back in 1989, went into creative hibernation after his next film, "Flesh and Bone" (1993), which he describes as "a complicated, emotionally exhausting movie to make." But Rudin (an old friend of Kloves' wife) kept trying to snag his interest with juicy movie material. "Scott can do 'Shaft,'" Kloves explains, "but next he's buying Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours.' He knows there's a certain stratum of talent that responds to good writing, and he wants to be in the game with these people." When the producer sent "Wonder Boys" Kloves' way, he jumped for it -- "I thought it was a great ride, and I loved the language Michael Chabon used to spin it out." It would be Kloves' first adaptation.
Bringing Kloves to the project gave it a writer who had, in screen terms, as distinctive a personality as Chabon's. "We had lunch, we talked, we exchanged e-mails," Chabon recalls. "But I'm not sure how much I helped. I tried to tell Steve it was his script and whatever he did was going to be fine. I didn't view this in any possessive way, but as something crazy and lucky that had happened to me." Chabon knew just how lucky when Kloves dared to add a character. In the book and movie there's a mysterious African-American -- in appearance a knockoff of James Brown -- who insists that the hero has stolen his car, a '66 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible. "Steve gave this guy a waitress girlfriend," says Chabon, "and it really worked. It was a Steve Kloves kind of character and relationship, but she fit into the whole world of 'Wonder Boys,' and she actually plays a small role in resolving things."
The screenwriter also made her pregnant -- which in the movie extends the parade of expectant mothers and surrogate children who tug at the protagonist's heart and mind, especially when the screen goes white and he falls in and out of fainting "episodes." Kloves says he thought the waitress's pregnancy would help keep her vivid. It's one of the film's many examples of serendipity meeting craft and creating poetry.
Kloves found himself growing more protective over Chabon's words than he ever did over his own. But eventually he practiced major surgery on the novel, most spectacularly when he excised the presence of the hero's wife and changed her from one of several Korean orphans adopted by Jewish parents to the daughter of Pennsylvania WASPs. A mock-epic Passover seder was one of the book's comic highlights, yet Chabon himself could see it had to go: "It was just taking up too much screen time -- it's hard enough to tell the story of one relationship well, and the movie is telling the story of two relationships, between the writer and his lover and the writer and his protégé."
Kloves harbored no illusions that his screenplay would ever get the green light from a studio: "I sympathize with people who read 12 scripts a weekend. To them, my script must have seemed like a mutant -- a mutant survivor of the late '60s and early '70s. It must have been like the prize in the Cracker Jack box, but the prize you didn't want. If there were people in the studio who liked it, I don't think there were many who loved it. I have to give them credit, because they allowed Curtis to go out and make this movie. But I'm sure Paramount looked at the book and thought, 'Good God, what is this? There's something to offend everybody.' Then Scott hires a guy like me, who is not going to make it more commercial. So the studio is on the hook with this project, but they want it to die on the hook. But it keeps not dying. And when Curtis enters the picture, it is clear that it's not dying."
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Hanson was coming off "L.A. Confidential," one of the best-loved Hollywood movies of the '90s, a neo-noir cop movie that was more like a historical epic about the promise and corruption of postwar Southern California. It, too, was a group performance piece -- a constellation of star turns from people who weren't yet stars (Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce) or had been character actors (Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell) or had flashed and collapsed like supernovas (Kim Basinger). Although Basinger won an Oscar, as did Hanson and Brian Helgeland for their adaptation of James Ellroy's novel, the movie mostly lost out to "Titanic," and never gained the financial success it deserved. But, as Hanson says, "all the studios who never wanted to make it because it was period, and noir, and an ensemble piece, now said that if they had, they could have done a better job distributing it." It gave Hanson, Kloves says, "enormous sting" in Hollywood. To Hanson what mattered was creative freedom and the ability to attract another dream ensemble cast.
After one meeting, it was clear to Hanson and Kloves that they were on the same gleefully modulating wavelength. "Part of what attracted me to the book and script," says Hanson, "was that drug use and adultery and lying and thieving, all these things that you may be expected to respond to in a politically correct or moralistic way, were presented as part of the natural human behavior of the people." But if Hanson is like the movie's hero in his acceptance of quirks, misdemeanors and frailties, he is most intent on creating films that can grab an audience and hold it. In the course of a collaboration that spread over a year and a half, Hanson and Kloves kept shoehorning in bits and pieces of Chabon's writing. Their main goal was to have the meaning of the tale come out as their hero runs an existential steeplechase that starts with the WordFest kickoff party and ends at its grand finale.
Both Hanson and Kloves view big-screen storytelling as a succession of emotion-charged images as well as propulsive scenes. I wasn't surprised to find that the shooting script contained many of the most spontaneous visual moments -- like the looks that cloud Maguire's face or race across McDormand's -- written out exactly on the page. Still, even this draft doesn't include the voice-over narration, which the filmmakers kept tweaking to the end, or the brisk, suggestive ending. What you get on-screen is an enthralling balance of density and dynamism.
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