Romba Press
small but perfectly bound
(2002)
A surreal, metafictional comedy-drama by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, who also wrote and directed Being John Malkovich. Kaufman is hired to write the screenplay for an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief, but suffers from writer’s block, finding the source material intractable. He gets himself out of this dilemma by turning his attempts to adapt the book into the film itself, throwing in his (non-existent) twin brother, script guru Robert McKee and a thriller-style climax for good measure. A funny, playful, and daring take on the writing process and the ‘Hollywoodisation’ of literature (and life).
(1987)
Another film about writer’s block. Larry (played by Billy Crystal) is so angry and resentful when his ex-wife steals his manuscript and has a huge success with it that he is unable to write. To make a living, he teaches a creative writing class at a community college and, when dispensing advice to one of his students, Owen (Danny DeVito) – a man with an overbearing mother - directs him to the Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train. Owen sees the movie as a solution to his personal problems, rather than his creative ones, and events take a blackly comic turn. And remember: “A Writer writes – always.”
(1991)
William S. Burrough’s seminal novel is non-linear and without any real ‘plot’, so was long seen as ‘unfilmable’. Screenwriter/Director David Cronenberg solves this problem by eschewing straight adaptation and mixing elements from the book with events and people in Burrough’s life – including his job as a pest exterminator, his accidental killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, and fictionalised versions of Paul and Jane Bowles, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. The result is a surreal ‘biography’ of Burroughs, culminating in the writing of Naked Lunch itself.
(2016)
Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver, living in Paterson, New Jersey, who also writes minimalist poetry about what he hears, sees, and feels in his own, small part of the world. The film shows one week in his life, with each day structured in much the same way. Jim Jarmusch’s movie is one of the few that effectively captures the creative process, showing poetry – and, by extension, art in general – not as an elevated, rarefied activity but more as a natural, unpretentious response to life, however mundane and repetitive it might be.
(1990)
After crashing his car in a blizzard, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), the successful author of a series of Victorian romance novels featuring plucky heroine Misery Chastain, finds himself at the mercy of his ‘number one fan’, Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Disgusted by the new novel he has just finished – a gritty semi-autobiographical contemporary story – Annie burns the manuscript and forces him to write a new instalment in the ‘Misery’ series, even though he has killed off the main character in his last book. Adapted from Stephen King’s novel, Misery is a gripping psychological thriller that acts as a metaphor for the relationship between writers and their readers, as well as depicting writing as an act of survival.
(1968)
Albert Finney directs and stars in a film about a successful Salford-born writer, now living in wealth and luxury in London, who travels back to Manchester, partly to see his son and take him to a football match at Old Trafford. Semi-autographical in nature – screenwriter Shelagh Delaney, like Finney, was born in Salford and both had enjoyed substantial success early in their careers which transformed their lives – Charlie Bubbles examines the effects of fame and the corresponding gap that can form between an artist and their roots, class, and perhaps their inspiration. Charlie’s journey in his Rolls-Royce, up the newly constructed M1, and the scenes of a Manchester that is being demolished and rebuilt show a nation in transformation, while also demonstrating the gap between north and south, as well as past and present – a gap in which Charlie is effectively stranded.
(1991)
Writer’s block again – Coen Brothers-style. Up-and-coming Broadway playwright, Barton Fink (John Turturro), is seduced by a lucrative Hollywood contract and, for his sins, finds himself ensconced in a cheap hotel room, tasked with writing the screenplay for a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. His struggle to do so and his encounters with fellow residents – including an alcoholic novelist and a loquacious insurance salesman – become more blackly comic and surreal, trapping him in a series of macabre events and a kind of limbo that is both an artistic and metaphysical.
(2011)
A mordant black comedy from Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, the director-writer team behind Juno. Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is the ghost writer of young adult novels who is finding it hard to finish the last book in a once popular high school drama series. Alcoholic and deeply frustrated with her life, she decides to go back to her hometown to steal away her childhood sweetheart, who is now married with a new-born baby. The theme of trying to turn back time to rewrite the past is cleverly paralleled with the idealised version of school days in YA novels while the film also deals with the mundanity of small-town life and how the past is never quite how we remember it to be.
(1972)
Michael Caine and writer/director Mike Hodges followed the success of Get Carter (1971) with a different type of movie altogether – although both films find their inspiration in American hard-boiled fiction. Mickey King (Caine) is a cockney writer, living in Malta, who churns out trashy pulp thrillers featuring over-the-top sex and violence, very much in the vein of Mickey Spillane. When he accepts the offer of a huge sum of money to ghost write the memoirs of a retired movie star with underworld connections, the hapless hack finds himself embroiled in the sort of events that he normally only writes about. Pulp is an enjoyable comedy-thriller which is both an homage to and a pastiche of pulp fiction.
(2000)
Based on Michael Chabon’s novel, Wonder Boys depicts a (very crazy) weekend in the life of novelist Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas). As in Throw Mamma from a Train, Tripp also teaches creative writing while struggling to finish a novel and becomes involved with a troubled student who precipitates a series of increasingly bizarre events. In Tripp’s case, these involve a dead dog, a stolen car and an item of clothing that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe. An offbeat comedy-drama - part road movie, part satire on university life and the world of writing programmes – with a strong cast and a mood of deadpan eccentricity.
