Salon.com > Bored to Death

Jason Schwartzman and Jonathan Ames are working on two movies together

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:54:00 +0000

"Bored to Death" creator Jonathan Ames is teaming up with the show's star, actor Jason Schwartzman, for two new projects. Earlier this week, the Hollywood Reporter announced that HBO is developing a feature film for its short-lived comedy, which will pick up where the show left off. Now THR says that the two, who are close friends, have another collaboration in the works: a film adaptation of "Pictures of Fidelman," a collection of short stories by Bernard Malamud. THR writes:

The stories detail the adventures of Arthur Fidelman, a hapless art student who travels to Rome in the mid-20th century. The film largely would be drawn from two stories, "Still Life" and "Naked Nude," though others might bleed into the script. Schwartzman -- who is filming Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" -- would star as Fidelman, who gets himself in "various comedic entanglements and perilous situations."

The film does not yet have financial backing, however.

“Bored to Death” keeps itself amused

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I recently re-watched the first season of HBO's "Bored to Death" (Mondays 9 p.m./8 central) -- created by novelist and newspaper columnist Jonathan Ames -- and was struck by how much it has changed. Between 2009 and now, the show's point-of-view has stayed more or less the same, but the tone, pace and emphases are different. The pilot, which showed Ames' self-named, white-wine-guzzling pothead hero (Jason Schwartzman) getting dumped by his girlfriend and offering himself on Craigslist as a private eye, felt like a solid early '90s New York indie film about relationships with a spoofy Raymond Chandler subplot grafted on. Pretending to be a detective let Jonathan behave with a brisk decisiveness that he lacked elsewhere in his life, and gave the writers license to satirize certain New York types: the soft young writer, the snooty book critic, the casually polyamorous single woman, the vain, out-of-it editors who epitomize what's left of the magazine and book business.

Jason Schwartzman: “Bored to Death” is not ironic

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:58:00 +0000

The third season of Jonathan Ames' "noir-otic" HBO comedy, "Bored to Death" — which starts this coming Monday — is a familiar mix of Brooklyn, N.Y., picaresque and stoner misadventure, with perhaps an extra jot of soul-searching on the part of its main character (Jason Schwartzman) and his decidedly neurotic pals (Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis). But whatever else you might think about it, Schwartzman is keen to stress one thing: It's not supposed to be ironic.

In a phone interview, Schwartzman chatted with me about the coming season's preoccupations (fatherhood, for one), writer Ames' "sarcasm deafness," and what it's like to play a fictional incarnation of your closest friend. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

I’ve read that you got involved with “Bored to Death” because you emailed writer Jonathan Ames — whose work you loved — and told him how much you wanted to join the project. Is that really how this all started for you?

“Bored to Death” hits its stride

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Writers need day jobs. This is the moral of HBO's "Bored to Death" (10 p.m. Sundays) and the moral to the story of every writer you'll ever meet, from paid professional to aspiring amateur to little-known dabbler. Newspapers, magazines, books, online publications are all under the gun these days, with the purse-keepers pressuring editors and writers alike to squeeze out more lively, popular content using fewer resources. The gum-shoe reporter and the thoughtful columnist alike have been forever supplanted by the tireless young blogger with a strong angle on Lady Gaga's latest bean burrito-shaped hat ("An ingenious commentary on the speed with which every consumable bit of pop product is digested and expunged from our collective cultural bowels!").

Longtime professional writers are running scared, sniffing around for new ways to pay the bills without either bleeding the stone or rehashing press releases and wire stories in pace with a mob of monkeys with typewriters But we deserve punishment, don’t we? This is what keeps us in our exquisite bind, keeps us fractured and isolated from each other: Our suspicion that writing itself is a luxury, that no matter how hard we've tried to improve at our so-called craft, ultimately we're just spoiled, soft-pawed neurotics who would better serve society by digging ditches or flipping burgers or doing almost anything else besides basking in the illusion that our silly little derivative thoughts and ideas matter to anyone other than ourselves.

Being bored could be bad for your health

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:06:00 +0000

Can you really be bored to death?

In a commentary to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in April, experts say there's a possibility that the more bored you are, the more likely you are to die early.

Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London caution that boredom alone isn't likely to kill you -- but it could be a symptom of other risky behavior like drinking, smoking, taking drugs or having a psychological problem.

The researchers analyzed questionnaires completed between 1985 and 1988 by more than 7,500 London civil servants ages 35 to 55. The civil servants were asked if they had felt bored at work during the previous month.

Britton and Shipley then tracked down how many of the participants had died by April 2009. Those who reported they had been very bored were two and a half times more likely to die of a heart problem than those who hadn't reported being bored.

But when the authors made a statistical adjustment for other potential risk factors, like physical activity levels and employment grade, the effect was reduced.

Other experts said while the research was preliminary, the link between boredom and increased heart problems was possible -- if not direct.

Best new TV: “Bored to Death”

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:10:00 +0000

There's nothing quite like New York City in September, and there's nothing quite like the gaggle of self-involved magazine editors, pretentious filmmakers and aimless creative types who haunt its bars and coffee shops, waxing about the little tragedies and joys of their cloistered existences. Captured endlessly in plays, TV and movies muddling through their precious urban lives with only strong coffee and strong drinks to guide them, these deluded denizens of Manhattan and Brooklyn share a limited understanding of just how self-indulgent and foolish they are. In the wrong writer's hands, such characters are intolerable. (Whit Stillman, anyone?) But in the right writer's hands, well, you've got the best Woody Allen films, for starters.

Novelist Jonathan Ames, who's been happily demeaning himself since he wrote a column about his neurotic tics, childhood experiences and sexual escapades for New York Press, may be a suitable scribe to pick up where Allen left off. In his HBO comedy "Bored to Death" (premieres 9:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 20) he peels back the layers of vanity and self-delusion that clog up overly precious creative circles to reveal a bunch of hapless children, trying (and often failing) to keep themselves productively occupied.