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COVER FOR YIDDISH POLICEMEN REVEALED?
Update: Looks like the cover is not the final version. Asked if that was indeed the final cover, Michael Chabon said, "Nope, that's just an early and, I believe, rejected 'sketch.'"
"Good sleuthing, though!" Chabon added. "Sort of reminds me of 'Blow Up.'"
DEFINITIVE AYELET ARTICLE ONLINE
Today's The San Francisco Chronicle has an exhaustive profile of Ayelet Waldman, wife of Michael Chabon. The article, which touches on nearly every aspect of her life you could possibly think of, is a must-read for Waldman and Chabon fans.
While I could quote the parts of the article dealing with its specific topic, Waldman's recent essays on motherhood, I rather quote the random tid-bits.
From the article:
ESCAPIST TAKES AN EISNER!!!
The awards, presented at Comic-Con International in San Diego, was the anthology's first Eisner. Brian K. Vaughan, who takes over The Escapist next issue, won "Best Writer" and "Best New Series" for Ex Machina.
Upon receiving the award, according to The Beat, Michael Chabon quipped, "Have you SEEN McSweeney's???"
McSweeney's #13, which featured an essay by Chabon, was nominated against The Escapist.
Later, at his website, Chabon posted the good news about receiving an award from what he called "the 'Oscars' of the comic book industry."
"The trophy is quite splendid--it looks like the top of the Daily Planet--and its recipient delighted and grateful," Chabon said. "Grateful as well to Diana Schutz for making the book into a fine value for your reading dollar, and to the exemplary editorial, production and marketing staff at Dark Horse Comics."
The Escapist previously took "Best New Series" and tied for "Best Anthology" at the Harvey Awards in June.
Some bloggers expressed surprise the series won. Jog speculates the series may have won on a sentimentality vote, given that issue #6 featured the last story by Will Eisner. This year's Comic-Con is in large part dedicated to the late artist's memory.
Over at Comics Should Be Good, Brian Cronin writes, "If the category was 'best collection of talent,' then yes, I would agree, but I do not think the Escapist was as good as the Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft OR McSweeney's Quarterly #13 OR Common Grounds!"
Tom Spurgeon of Comics Reporter said Chabon's comment about beating McSweeney's "pretty much sums up my feelings on a lot of awards."
"It's not that what I feel is the best book as a critic never wins Eisners," Spurgeon said, "but it's more like it seems that the Eisners are always given to whatever comic brings the most pleasure in any way as opposed to the one that reaches excellence, which is a perfectly fine standard to have as a reader and kind of a sad one to project as an industry."
Chabon also presented an award. Like all of the other presenters, he made introductory comments about Will Eisner, according to Newsarama.
To see the rest of winners, click here.
WHO ARE ROTH AND WEAVER?
A preview for issue #8 at the back of the current issue features the two characters, which the comic describes as "the latter-day version of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay." The Clevland duo will set out to resurrect the Escapist in a multi-part story by Brian K. Vaughan and Philip Bond.
The preview also revealed that Harvey Pekar, famed creator of American Splendor and a Cleveland resident himself, will take the Escapist "on a tour through the twisted alley of his own psyche!"
The issue will also feature Eduardo Barreto, Dean Haspiel, Jeff Parker, Andi Watson, and others.
No actual solicitation for Escapist #8 has been released yet. However, IGN reports from Comic-Con International that Vaughan's two-year run will "not your typical Escapist tale," instead telling the tale of two comic creators "who love the Escapist and one day purchase the rights to his likeness."
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #8 hits stands in November. To see a full-size picture of the preview, click here.
AYELET: DON'T DO BLOGS!
Author Tom Dolby, in an article for Monday's San Francisco Chronicle about whether writers should blog, had this interesting tid-bit from Ayelet Waldman, wife of Michael Chabon, author of several novels, and a former blogger.
SWINK #3 TO FEATURE CHILDHOOD CHABON, LETHEM COMICS
Remember a while back that Swink, the biannual literary magazine, announced Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and Chris Offutt had contributed comics drawn in their childhood for an upcoming issue?
An editor at the publication confirmed the strips will be in their next issue, Swink #3, due out this winter.
The strips are to be part of a section about the role comic books have played in the lives of authors.
YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION NOW ON AMAZON
Michael Chabon's next novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has finally been added to the American version of Amazon, with a publication date of April 1.
Meanwhile, the German version of Amazon now lists the book's publication date as May 1, 2006, a change from the previously reported March 26. The publication dates indicate another delay in the novel's release.
The American edition, currently listed as 400 pages long, will be published by HarperCollins, while the German edition, listed as 640 pages long, will be published by Fourth Estate.
Chabon began writing the novel more than three years ago, back when it was going by the title Hotzeplotz. His original plan was to publish the novel fall 2005.
The novel, as Chabon once described it to the New York Metro, is a "thriller set in an alternate reality where, instead of a Hebrew-speaking Jewish state in the Middle East, there's a Yiddish-speaking Jewish state in lower Alaska."
Americans can expect to pay $26.95 at the stand, or $17.79, for the book. Its ISBN number is 0007149824.
CHABON MAYBE NOT SO FANTASTIC
If Michael Chabon could have had it his way 10 years ago, he'd be getting some of that too.
Chabon, who helped shape the script for last year's Spider-Man 2, posted a "rudimentary and incomplete" pitch he made in the fall of 1995 to Chris Columbus’s 1492 Productions. The production house at the time held the option for Marvel's cornerstone title, and Chabon, fresh from the novel Wonder Boys, wanted in.
Chabon, with a copy of Fantastic Four #42 ("The Coming of Galactus!") in his brief-case and a "4"-logo pin in the lapel of his Levi's jacket, made his pitch to the development crew.
They didn't bite.
"Imagine a buzzer... the size of Galactus’s left buttock," a man from 1492 said afterward, according to Chabon.
No doubt Chabon was not the first nor the last celebrity fan-boy to have his dreams of writing "Flame On!" crushed before they could ignite. Sean Astin of Lord of the Rings-fame had saught the director's chair, only to watch as Tim Story (Barbershop) signed-on instead. Chabon recounts having "a good laugh" with the people at 1492 "about all the hopeless fanboy screenwriters who had been parading through with their pitches over the past several months."
Chabon says he has yet to see Fantastic Four or read the script, making comparing his story to theirs impossible. But if he could have a second chance, he says he'd focus on the quartet as a family.
"I think that if I were going to take a whack at it now, I would try to find a story that was much more the story of a family, of family dynamic, of family history and family romance and family angst," Chabon says.
No doubt Chabon's story differs significantly in one significant aspect from the finished product, as he says in his pitch the movie shouldn't "be about how they got their powers."
"It's a pretty goofy origin story," according to his pitch. Instead, Chabon suggested jumping ahead in the story by using a device "in the vein of the opening of Citizen Kane and the film on DNA in Jurassic Park."
Like the movie, however, Chabon, while toying with the possibility of Galactus, in the end chose Dr. Doom for his villain.
The story, which predates Chabon's other-failed comic pitch, X-Men, by a year, was "written to be delivered in a semi-off-the-cuff manner in the context of a pitch meeting," Chabon says, "something I had never done before that day and have never done since with any success whatever."
Chabon's plot would have found the FF trying to stop Dr. Doom from using a time-machine from altering reality into a darkworld which "he would dominate with ease."
While the FF try to stop him, Reed and Sue debate getting married or not. Sue also gets kidnapped and brainwashed by Communists, who send her to kill the rest of the team. The brainwashing allows her full-powers to emerge, transforming her from Invisible Girl to Invisible Woman.
"The story, then, is the ironic one of how the FF save their world from turning into ours--and of how Reed and Sue finally come together," Chabon says in his pitch.
The only screenplay Chabon had written before the FF pitch was The Gentleman Host, a romantic comedy for Scott Rudin and Paramount which, as Chabon puts it, "had as yet gone nowhere, a course it continued to follow with admirable steadfastness until it was taken out and shot in the dead of night sometime in 1996."
"In any case there was nothing in it to indicate that I was in any way qualified to write a multimillion-dollar CGI epic," Chabon says.
Unlike with literature, Chabon has struggled to find success in Hollywood. Along with movies like X-Men and Gentleman Host, Chabon has also seen TV series ideas such as "House of Gold" and "Garageland" die before they could hit the air. Chabon's Spider-Man 2 script saw a rewrite by Alvin Sargent, and his adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has gone through at least eight drafts to date with no production date in sight.
In a 2000 interview with The Onion, Chabon explained his movie writing as more about money than art.
"The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to supplement the income you get from writing novels," Chabon said at the time. "In my case, so far, I've been able to get by working in Hollywood with this TV stuff I've been doing. And it's very important, because my wife is a writer, too, and we don't have health insurance through any employer. Therefore, our health insurance comes through the screenwriter's guild, so I can only ensure my family's health by working in Hollywood."
He continued: "In a way, that's a problem for me, because I'd much prefer to be writing novels all the time. But from the point of view of the marketplace for novels, I want my book to do well, and I want my publisher to be happy with me and to feel like I'm a good bet."
That's not to say his film work has gone totally unappreciated. Rogert Ebert, reviewing the Spider-Man sequel, said, "One of the keys to the movie's success must be the contribution of novelist Michael Chabon to the screenplay; Chabon understands in his bones what comic books are, and why."
And while Fantastic Four may be doing well at the box office, it's definitely not doing that hot with the critics, with only a 27 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes, compared to 93 percent for Spidey 2.
"What’s even sadder is that those in power feel comic book movies no longer require a visionary filmmaker in the director’s chair, like a Tim Burton or a Sam Raimi, nor require a top writer who understands the art of storytelling, like a Mario Puzo or a Robert Benton or a Michael Chabon or an Alvin Sargent, nor require A-list actors to play the leads, like a Gene Hackman or a Michael Keaton or a Jack Nicholson," wrote Edward Havens of FilmJerk.Com. "Nope, it seems that all you need to make a comic book movie is a director whose entire directorial history consists of 'Barbershop' and 'Taxi,' a screenwriter who already screwed up the recent 'Hulk' and 'Punisher' films and some TV actors looking to have some post-cancellation pull."
Chabon is currently writing Snow and the Seven, a kung-fu remake of Snow White, for Disney.
To read Chabon's full pitch and commentary, click here.
CHABON'S AWARD GOES TO THE CLEANERS
Leah Garchik reports in her San Francisco Chronicle gossip column that Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, called the Commonwealth Club after misplacing a $2,000 check the club gave him for receiving their California Book Awards gold medal. But according to the club, he ain't the first writer to send to lose his green, as Ayelet Waldman once sent a jacket of Michael Chabon's to the cleaners, with his award check in the pocket, after he'd won for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
MARKETING AND DISNEY'S SNOW AND THE SEVEN
The Guardian has a fascinating article out today detailing the business atmosphere behind Disney's Snow and the Seven, a kung-fu remake of the Snow White tale scripted by Michael Chabon and directed by Yuen Woo-ping.
China has one of the world's most protected and least-developed film industries. With less than 2,000 mostly old cinemas, its ratio of screens to people is 70 times lower than in the US.
Box-office revenues are tiny, but they grew last year by 50%. According to the investment bank China eCapital, sales of tickets and merchandising will more than double by 2007.
To protect domestic filmmakers, the state allows only 20 foreign titles to be distributed each year. Release is often delayed for several months, long after pirated DVD versions are available for less than a fifth of the price of a cinema ticket.
Hollywood's biggest studios, such as Sony's Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers, are trying to get around this problem by co-producing films with domestic companies, which has the added advantage of tapping into the global popularity of martial arts films such as Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers.
Another benefit is the low production costs. Even a big budget Chinese epic can usually be filmed for less than $5m (£2.84m) - a fraction of the $100m plus that Hollywood regularly blows. Animation costs in Shanghai are said to be 80% lower than in Los Angeles. CHABON & CREW AT SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON
But that's not all! On Thursday, July 14, from 1:00 to 2:00 pm, you should most definitely catch the 45-minute preview of Will Eisner: The Spirit of An Artistic Pioneer, a documentary by Andrew and Jon Cooke. Chabon was interviewed for the profile. You can catch this in Room 8.
Oh, and, of course, there's this insignificant award show on Friday, July 15. You know, that one dedicated to Will Eisner, the Eisner Awards. If you don't go to that and root for The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist to win Best Anthology or for Brian K. Vaughan to win his seven nominations, then there's something wrong with you.
Alas, I will once again miss the convention (if you've ever booked a plane ticket from Alaska, you know why). But if any of you go and run into the Escapist crew at the convention or see the movie or go to the awards, you should definitely shoot me a note and share your tale!
UPDATE: According to Chabon's site, Diana Schutz, the editor of Escapist, will also be at the Dark Horse booth with the rest of the crew. They will be signing Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #7, according to the site.
Got news? E-mail me!
Sunday, July 24, 2005, 8:15 PM ET
Updated: Tuesday, August 1, 2005, 12:10 AM ET
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
A photo in The San Francisco Chronicle's profile of Ayelet Waldman carried an interesting bonus: the cover art for Michael Chabon's next novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union!
Sunday, July 24, 2005, 8:15 PM ET
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
To read the actual article (which you should and must), click here.
Saturday, July 16, 2005, 3:00 PM ET
Updated: Monday, July 18, 2005, 9:50 AM ET
Source: Comic-Con International, The Beat, MichaelChabon.Com
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist had a big win Friday night, taking "Best Anthology" at the 2005 Will Eisner Awards.
Saturday, July 16, 2005, 3:00 PM ET
Source: Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #7, IGN
Fans who picked-up their copies of Escapist #7 this week were in for a treat: a preview for the series' newest characters, Maxwell Roth and Case Weaver!
Wednesday, July 13, 2005, 12:40 AM ET
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
I'm certainly not the first person to express a dissenting voice about this. When I was in San Francisco recently as a Library Laureate, I spoke with the writer Ayelet Waldman about it. "Don't do it," she said. "Blogging will ruin your life." Several months ago, Waldman wrote about her own experience in Salon, concluding that when she was blogging, "The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening."
To read the rest of Dolby's piece, click here.
Monday, July 11, 2005, 2:30 AM ET
Source: Exclusive
Sunday, July 10, 2005, 11:30 PM ET
Source: Amazon (USA), Amazon (Germany)
Sunday, July 10, 2005, 1:30 AM ET
Source: MichaelChabon.Com
During its opening day on Friday, 20th Century Fox's Fantastic Four pulled in an estimated $20 million, money that no doubt screen writers Michael France and Mark Frost will see a little of.
Thursday, July 7, 2005, 9:45 PM ET
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, July 5, 2005, 6:40 AM ET
Source: The Guardian
The remake is part of an attempt by Hollywood studios to capitalise on the relaxation of controls on film-making and screen building in a potential market of 1.3 billion people.
To read the entire article, click here.
Sunday, July 3, 2005, 6:40 AM ET
UPDATE: Sunday, July 3, 2005, 3:20 PM ET
Source: Dark Horse Comics, Comic-Con, MichaelChabon.Com
In case any of you are headed to the San Diego Comic-Con International next week, you might want to know that if you head over to the Dark Horse booth from 12:00 to 1:30 pm on Friday, July 15, you'll be able to catch Michael Chabon and several other contributers to The Escapist, including Paul Hornschemeier, Eduardo Barreto, and M.K. Perker.