Mysteries of Pittsburgh
The LA Times has a great article about my friend and former assistant Rawson Thurber, whose adaptation of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh debuts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I’ve seen the movie five times, and am ridiculously proud of Mr. Thurber.
Trivia: If you’re watching The Nines, that’s Rawson’s house which gets burned down at the start of the movie. And if you’re watching The Nines on DVD (ahem), the short film God was shot at my apartment off of Melrose, which Rawson later took over.
I probably need to start paying my location scouts more.
Articles
January 19th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Good for him! Will look for it.
January 19th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Did you like Dodgeball?
January 19th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Rawson Thurber is a very cool name. It sounds like a literary character.
And I thought Dodgeball was hilarious.
January 19th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
http://www.myspace.com/mysteriesofpittsburgh
Enough said!
January 19th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
wasn’t a huge fan of the book — read it after kavalier and clay though.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
John, I think you and Miranda July should get together and make a movie. Just because it would be really cool to have a July & August Production.
Anyway, now that I got that out of my system — according to IMDB, Rawson is the third assistant of yours to make it in Hollywood. Questions:
1) Who were the other two? 2) What voodoo do you do to inject/foster these folks with such talent? 3) Are you taking any applications?
January 20th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
John! John! John! I hate you! I just finished watching The Nines and it was pretty good, except you stole my idea! Nothing from the body of the film was the same, though the tone was, but the idea behind it all of what’s really going on – I have a script half finished with that as the twist! Now what do I do? My question is – how did you even discover it? Maybe you hired someone to break into my house and copy my hard drive… maybe you hacked my computer. Why John August? Why! I thought you had integrity! But seriously… dude, I had that very same idea. dammit
January 21st, 2008 at 2:36 am
Also excited about the rumour linking him to the Rifts movie. I know it’ll probably be stuck in development hell for years, but still… Rifts movie! With someone who’s actually played Rifts writing it!
January 21st, 2008 at 5:17 am
AICN now has a small, albeit uninformative review of the film. Hopefully I can catch this film sometime.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:32 am
Caught it at the Racquet 8:30am show Sunday. It was really good– best movie I saw at Sundance this year (although unfortunately it was kind of a mediocre-quality year for features this year for me and others, especially compared with last year).
It moves at a fast, goofy clip. And Jon Foster is really, really good. So are the other principals. And (no spoilers here) the gutsy-to-go-there plot point that happens toward the end of Act 2 actually elicited gasps among the LA-narcotized crowd here. (Though I would have liked, ahem, a longer scene with the lights on. But that’s being greedy.)
I haven’t read any of Chabon’s work, but Hanson’s WONDER BOYS was my favorite film of its year and although MYSTERIES isn’t quite at that level for me, it’s darn close. Thurber should be damn proud!
January 26th, 2008 at 6:17 am
I haven’t seen it, i understand why you’re proud, but i’m upset. Chabon is one of my favorite authors, Mysteries is great, and Thurber just deleted one of the most important characters in the book; only to mold him into another character. So he takes 2 characters from a novel, with conflicting ideals, meshes them into one character and expects to keep the heart of the story intact? I love the book so much, i’m afraid to see the movie when i hear 2 characters(very different characters) are made into one. I will see it, i just scared cause seeing these differences, for me, it’s scary. Loved Big Fish!