Eggers' WILD THINGS novelization details online
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
This news is a couple of weeks old, but somehow it's the first I'm hearing of it and I'm assuming it's fresh to you too. Amazon has posted the sales blurb for Dave Eggers' upcoming novel based on Spike Jonze's upcoming film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's story, Where the Wild Things Are. (Click the image at left to buy the book.)
"The Wild Things — based loosely on the storybook by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay cowritten with Spike Jonze — is about the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t control. His father is gone, his mother is spending time with a younger boyfriend, his sister is becoming a teenager and no longer has interest in him. At the same time, Max finds himself capable of startling acts of wildness: he wears a wolf suit, bites his mom, and can’t always control his outbursts."
Both the film and the book will have to be "loosely based" on Sendak's book, since the original is only 150 (very potent) words long. Fortunately, Eggers tells The Montreal Gazette that Sendak's been involved in the production and very much approves of the work Eggers and Jonze are doing.
"We all really get along - Spike and Maurice and I always had the same goals for the movie, and the novelization, too, which was to sort of reinstitute the dangerous elements of that book. Because when it came out, it was pretty controversial and some librarians didn’t like it, and child psychologists thought it was, you know, unhelpful. And it was really morally ambiguous in a way (...) Spike and Maurice and I just decided we needed to make the book wild and dangerous again and really unexpected. So the movie is really unlike anything anyone will expect, I think. And the book is different from both of them, actually. It has Max and Max going to an island, but in the book I’m able to [develop] the storyline also - as a book can always do. You have a lot more room to play withl."
(Via Slashfilm.)
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