Wonder Boys (film)

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Wonder Boys
Image:Wonder Boys film.jpg Wonder Boys film poster
Directed by	Curtis Hanson
Produced by	Curtis Hanson Scott Rudin
Written by	Novel: Michael Chabon Screenplay: Steven Kloves
Starring	Michael Douglas Tobey Maguire Frances McDormand Robert Downey, Jr. Katie Holmes Rip Torn
Editing by	Dede Allen
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures (USA) Universal Studios (UK) Warner Bros. (France)
Release date(s)	February 22, 2000
Running time	111 min.
Language	English
Budget	$35,000,000 (est.)
IMDb profile

Wonder Boys is a 2000 film adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel of the same name. It stars Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes and Robert Downey Jr. Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "the most accurate movie about campus life that I can remember."

Directed by Curtis Hanson, Wonder Boys was filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, including locations at Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham College, and Shady Side Academy. Other Pennsylvania locations included Beaver, Rochester and Rostraver Township. Released February 22, 2000, the film reunited Holmes and Maguire, who had appeared together three years earlier in The Ice Storm. After Wonder Boys failed at the box office, there was a second attempt to find an audience with a new marketing campaign and a November 8, 2000, re-release, which was also a financial disappointment.

Contents 1 Story 2 Re-Release 3 Soundtrack 4 Reaction 4.1 Awards 4.2 Box office 5 Trivia 6 See also 7 External links

Story

Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is a novelist who teaches creative writing at an unnamed Pittsburgh university. He is having an affair with the university chancellor, Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), whose husband Walter is the chairman of the English department, and thus Grady's boss. Grady's third wife, Emily, has just left him, and he has failed to repeat the success of his first novel, published years earlier. He continues to labor on a second novel, but the more he tries to finish it the less able he finds himself to invent a satisfactory ending - the book runs to several thousand pages and is still far from finished. He spends his free time smoking marijuana and self-medicating with codeine.

His students include James Leer (Tobey Maguire) and Hannah Green (Katie Holmes). Hannah and James are friends and both very good writers. Hannah, who rents a room in Tripp's large house, is attracted to Tripp, but he does not reciprocate. James is enigmatic, quiet, dark and enjoys writing fiction more than he first lets on.

During a party at the Gaskells' house, Sara reveals to Grady that she is pregnant with his child. Grady finds James standing outside holding what he claims to be a replica gun, won by his mother at a fairground during her schooldays. However, the gun turns out to be very real, as James shoots the Gaskells' dog when he finds it attacking Grady. James also steals a very valuable piece of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia from the house. Grady is unable to tell Sara of this incident as she is pressuring him to choose between her and Emily, so Grady is forced to keep the dead dog in his car for most of the weekend, and also to allow James to follow him around, fearing that he may be depressed or even suicidal. Gradually he realises that much what James tells him is untrue, and designed to elicit Grady's sympathy and so that he can hang out with Grady.

Meanwhile, Grady's editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), has flown into town on the pretense of attending the university's annual WordFest, a literary event for aspiring authors. In reality, Crabtree is there to see if Tripp has written anything worth publishing, as both men's careers depend on Grady's book. Terry arrives with a transvestite whom he met on the flight, called Antonia Sloviak (Michael Cavadias). The pair apparently become intimate in a bedroom at the Gaskells' party, but immediately afterwards Terry meets, and becomes infatuated with, James Leer, and Miss Sloviak is unceremoniously sent home. Terry wants to publish what James writes, and the two spend a curious night together in one of Grady's spare rooms.

Tired and confused, Grady phones Walter Gaskell (Richard Thomas) and reveals to him that he is in love with Walter's wife. Meanwhile, Walter has also made the connection between the disappearance of Marilyn Monroe's jacket and James Leer, and the following morning a policeman arrives to arrest James and demand the jacket back. The jacket is in Grady's car, given to him by a friend as payment for a loan. Over the weekend Grady has come to suspect that the car was stolen, as he has been repeatedly accosted by a man claiming to be its real owner. He eventually tracks the car down, but in a dispute over its ownership the majority of his manuscript blows out of the car and is lost. The car's owner gives him a ride to the university, with his wife, Oola, in the passenger seat, wearing the stolen jacket. Remembering James Leer's distress at how lonely the jacket looked in its own special closet, Grady tells her. Grady tells Oola the story behnd the jacket and allows her to leave with it. Terry convinces Walter not to press charges by agreeing to publish his book about what he calls "a critical exploration of the union of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe and its function in American mythopoetics, titled The Last American Marriage".

The movie ends with Grady recounting the eventual fate of the main characters - Hannah graduates and becomes a magazine editor, James drops out and moves to New York with Crabtree to rework his novel for publication, and Crabtree himself "goes right on being Crabtree." Grady finishes typing his new novel (now using a computer rather than a typewriter), then watches Sara and their child in the garden together for a moment, before turning back to the computer and clicking "Save."

Re-Release

Many critics blamed Paramount's initial ad campaign for the film failing to find a mainstream audience. The Wall Street Journals Joe Morgenstern praised Douglas' work in the movie, but criticized the movie poster: "a raffishly eccentric role, and he's never been so appealing. (Don't be put off by the movie's cryptic poster, which makes him look like Michael J. Pollard.)" The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan also slammed the poster: "The film's ad poster brings Elmer Fudd to mind."

Amy Taubin interviewed Hanson for the Village Voice and he said, "The very things that made Michael and I want to do the movie so badly were the reasons it was so tricky to market. Since films go out on so many screens at once, there's a need for instant appeal. But Wonder Boys isn't easily reducible to a single image or a catchy ad line." Hanson felt that the studio played it safe with the original ad campaign featured a headshot of Douglas. The posters and the trailer for the re-release highlighted the ensemble cast.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack features several songs by Bob Dylan, including one new composition, "Things Have Changed"; Hanson also created a music video for "Things Have Changed," filming new footage of Bob Dylan on the film's various locations and editing it with footage used in Wonder Boys as if Dylan were actually in the film. The song eventually won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for "best original song." Tim Hardin's "Reason To Believe" and Neil Young's "Old Man" and other vintage recordings are featured in the film.

Reaction

Roger Ebert a film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times praised Wonder Boys as "the most accurate movie about campus life that I can remember. It is accurate, not because it captures intellectual debate or campus politics, but because it knows two things: (1) Students come and go, but the faculty actually lives there, and (2) many faculty members stay stuck in graduate-student mode for decades."^[1] Emanuel Levy of Variety said that

"The movie's frivolous touches and eccentric details emphasize its dry, measured wit and the power of comedy to underscore serious ideas. Massively inventive, "Wonder Boys" is spiked with fresh, perverse humor that flows naturally from the straight-faced playing."^[2]

A.O. Scott from The New York Times wrote,

"What occupies the screen is a well-intentioned muddle. The problem with "Wonder Boys" is not that it's a bad movie, though if it had risked becoming one it might have been a lot more. The problem is that everyone involved seems to have agreed that it was a great idea for a movie and pretty much left it at that."^[3]

Looking back in his Salon.com review, critic Andrew O'Hehir felt that Hanson,

"and cinematographer Dante Spinotti capture both Pittsburgh (one of the most serendipitously beautiful American cities) and the netherworld of boho academia with brilliant precision. If you went to a liberal-arts college anywhere in the United States, then the way Grady's ramshackle house looks in the wake of Crabs' enormous all-night party should conjure up vivid sense-memories."^[4]

Wonder Boys holds an 83 percent "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.5 rating at the Internet Movie Database with 20,063 votes, which is above average.

Awards

Bob Dylan won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Things Have Changed" in 2001. In addition, the film was nominated for Best Editing and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published.

Dylan also won Best Original Song at the 2001 Golden Globe Awards and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

Michael Douglas and Frances McDormand won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association award in 2000 for Wonder Boys in categories Best Actor (Douglas) and Best Supporting Actress (McDormand).

Box office

In its opening weekend, the film grossed a total of $5,808,919 in 1,253 theaters. As of November 29 2006, the film has grossed a total of $33,426,588 worldwide.^[5]

Trivia

• Tobey Maguire's character James Leer is working on a long story. From the text shown on the first page, it is seen to be a copy of Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. In the movie it is titled The Love Parade.

• The movie deviates from the novel several times. In the novel, for example, when Grady and James make the trip to Emily's home, she and her whole family are there. Grady has a deep conversation with Emily's father out in his workshed before they return inside to a traditional Jewish holiday meal. Emily learns of Grady's affair from her sister Deborah, and throws him out of the house. In the movie, Grady and James only meet Emily's mother and father briefly before heading back to Pittsburgh. Also, the character who Grady and Crabtree name "Vernon Hardapple" is, in the novel, an unpleasant, violent gangster from whom Grady barely escapes with his life, but is depicted as being much more warm-hearted in the movie, even going so far as to drive Grady across town after his own car is damaged.

• As James channel surfs at Emily's parents' house, he watches snatches of the movie The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), the TV shows Route 66 and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and the movie Babes in Arms (1939) with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney singing "Good Morning."

• James mentions that his parents lived in Carvel, Pennsylvania. Carvel is the fictional town that is home to Andy Hardy and his family in the popular Andy Hardy films from the 1930s and 1940s.

• Alan Ladd's name was removed from Tobey Maguire's list of actors who have committed suicide because Ladd's family objected.

• The combination to the safe in Walter Gaskell's house is 5641---for Joe Dimaggio's 56-game hitting streak in '41.

• James Ellroy, a crime fiction writer, whose novel, L.A. Confidential, director Curtis Hanson adapted, gave Ellroy a quick, almost unnoticeable cameo during the WordFest gathering at the Chancellor's home. He is briefly shown chatting to his fellow guests.

• The character of Hannah Green is loosely based on a real person; a University of Pittsburgh alumnist named Keely Bowers who rented Chuck Kinder's attic for many years. She did not, however, wear cowboy boots.

See also

• Queer Cinema

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