Editor's Note: Michael Chabon is the author of The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay, for which he was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize, and Wonder Boys, from which the
film of the same name starring Michael Douglas was
based on.
The following is © Michael Chabon and is reprinted
with permission.
AN ACCOUNT OF A BRIEF BOUT OF MUTANT MADNESS
In the spring of 1996, I was approached by an
executive at Twentieth Century Fox. He knew my work,
particularly my sci-fi screenplay The Martian Agent,
and he knew I took a somewhat guilty interest in
comic books. Would I, he wanted to know, be
interested in taking a whack at a script for the
by-now almost terminally ill-starred X-Men
movie (I would be writer number four at least)?
Would I? Oh, boy!
What follows is the letter and accompanying
proposal that formed my response.
A madness came over me. I really thought I was
going to be writing a movie about some of the
seminal and transcendent heroes of my own twisted
and unhappy early adolescence. I put way too much
thought, time and energy into this thing, all for
free.
The proposal was politely discussed, then just as
politely rejected. The juggernaut rolled on, and has
since, I'm sure, crushed other writers under its
wheels.
When the madness wore off, I was surprisingly
relieved to have failed. I discovered that I had a
lot of other great projects at hand, some of them
with a shot at actually being works of art. I would
not, as it turned out, have wanted to write the X-Men
movie, at all.
"You made the right decision," the
executive later told me. And even though I had not
in fact made any decision at all, I said that I knew
he was right.
On to the letter
and proposal...
If you have no idea who the X-Men are, or take
absolutely no interest in them, as is doubtless both
fortunate and sensible, I suggest you leave this page
immediately.
POSTSCRIPT: As everyone
interested in the X-Men knows by now, the filmed
versions of the Lee-Kirby-Claremont-Cockrum-Byrne-Wein
mutants have, at long last, made their appearance in
the Great Multiplex. I saw the movie; I liked it pretty
well. It managed, I thought, to capture some of the
loony angst and absurd grandeur of the comics that
inspired it. I tip my hat to Mssrs. Singer et al. Too
bad about Storm, though.
Michael
Chabon's Website
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