'Dodgeball' Director Talks Changes in Chabon's 'Pittsburgh'

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The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon’s 1988 debut novel is finally hitting the screen at next week’s Sundance Film Festival with an adaptation written and directed by Dodgeball’s Rawson Marshall Thruber. But not without some changes, as he tells and defends to The Advocate:

Let’s talk about some of the big changes you’ve made in your adaptation. In the book, the main character, Art (played in the film by Jon Foster), is romantically linked to his girlfriend, Phlox, his best friend, Arthur, and there’s interest in a third character, Cleveland. In your version, Phlox is now a supporting character and Arthur has been excised entirely. Instead you have promoted supporting characters Jane (Sienna Miller) and Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard) to Art’s love interests and they now form a romantic triangle. And you have changed Cleveland’s sexuality from straight to bi to make this work. Why did you have to make so many changes to the book?

This is something that was front and center in my treatment: the novel works beautifully, but part of the struggle in adapting it for film is that the engine of the novel is a four-pointed “love rhombus,” which isn’t as efficient a shape as a triangle for cinema. Also, the novel is told in the first person, which is always inherently difficult to adapt. Art Bechstein in the novel is interesting because he’s telling this story, because he’s imbued by Michael Chabon’s powers of observation and description. Were you to adapt that directly, you end up with a passive main character.

And:

Similarly, why has Phlox — the female lead of the novel — turned into a supporting role in favor of Jane, who plays a very minor role in the book as Cleveland’s on/off girlfriend?

I think that Phlox still exists in a very similar manner to the character she was in the novel — someone who’s deeply passionate and wonderful. And I think that Art’s relationship with Phlox in the novel is similar to what it is in the film, in that Art’s not sure why he’s with her, and she takes everything so terribly seriously. I think [Phlox’s new role] was Michael Chabon’s idea, actually, because I was going to have the drive of the narrative be between Jane, Cleveland, and Art, and I didn’t want to lose Phlox.

In terms of Jane, I remember talking to Michael about it. I think he had felt that he didn’t do all he could with that character, who was so great and had such a lovely introduction in the novel. I took some of those elements of Phlox and gave them to Jane and strengthened the character, and then repurposed Phlox.

I was a little worried about the radical changes. In its last pages, Chabon writes one of my favorite passages ever for the now-supporting character of Phlox: “But I can never learn to be a world, as Phlox was a world, with her own flora and physics, atmosphere and birds. I am left, as Coleridge was his useless dream poem, with a glittering sock and a memory, a garbled account of my visit to her planet, uncertain of what transpired there and of why precisely I couldn’t stay.”

Also for consumption, one of my favorite Michael Chabon essays: “On ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’” (the full text used to be available at Chabon’s now-closed web site, but I can’t find it).

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