Salon.com > Chuck Palahniuk

Chokin’ on Chuck

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:26:00 +0000

Fox Searchlight/Jessica Miglio

Sam Rockwell in "Choke."

Maybe the secret to adapting Chuck Palahniuk's novels into movies is not to take them so damn seriously. If David Fincher's "Fight Club" became a problematic monument in American film history by outdoing its source material in paranoid portentousness -- and by overwhelming it with cinematic technique -- then actor-turned-director Clark Gregg's adaptation of Palahniuk's "Choke" (which I covered briefly from Sundance last January) takes an entirely different approach. Pretty much dumping any effort at high-minded social satire, Gregg's "Choke" is a fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

Sundance hands out hardware

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:18:00 +0000

Scenes from "Frozen River" and "Trouble the Water"

Film-festival awards, with the partial and occasional exception of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, have all the aesthetic significance and marketplace impact of yesterday's bus transfer. Very often the most intriguing premieres and highest-profile titles aren't in competition (again, Cannes is an exception), and very often both jury and audience awards tend to land on a film that excels in no particular area, but doesn't offend anybody or piss anybody off.

Blood on the streets

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:42:00 +0000

Made in America

PARK CITY, Utah -- We're into the homestretch here at Sundance, with the mountains bathed in that Western combination of brilliant sunshine and crippling cold, the kind of cold that freezes car-door locks, not to mention any iPhones or BlackBerrys left outside for more than 10 minutes. After numerous ritual proclamations of sobriety and abstinence, the buyers are now rushing to spend money like a bunch of drunks running from the 12-step meeting to last call.

"Hamlet 2," a high-school showbiz comedy starring Steve Coogan as a drama teacher who stages a musical sequel to Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, became the focus of the first and perhaps only bidding frenzy at Sundance this year and went to NBC Universal's Focus Features for $10 million, a near-record price for this festival. ("Little Miss Sunshine" cost $10.5 million two years ago.) I haven't seen the film (although word of mouth has been outstanding), but that's a shitload of front-end money for what sounds like a mash-up of various indie-comedy themes.

In your tribe

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 19:32:00 +0000

It's 7 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ethan Watters and I are at the Rite Spot, a cheap, popular, moderately Bohemian hangout in San Francisco's Mission district, well known for its good lighting, great music, and terrible food. Tonight the place is almost empty, but we're a bit early -- this is just a quick pit stop before we meet up with Watters' friends for their weekly softball game. A San Francisco journalist and author of the new book "Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment," Watters is agreeing with me that a lot of people might be pretty skeptical about the premise of his book -- that loose networks of close friends, or tribes, sustain each other emotionally and professionally for the years in between college and marriage, and that the strength of these tribes is a particularly new phenomenon.

"If someone comes along and says, 'Hey, you and your friends -- you're in an urban tribe,' the response is pretty much, 'Fuck you, I'm not in a tribe,'" he admits. "I appreciate that. I just want to begin a conversation about this. And I hope the book is the beginning of that conversation."

The company of men

Fri, 20 Apr 2001 20:37:00 +0000

Entering the wood-paneled hall, it's tempting to check the surrounding faces for telltale signs: mushy black eyes, hospital-shaven heads, the acknowledging smirk on a bruised face. In advance of "Postcards From the Future," the first-ever Chuck Palahniuk conference, no one seems quite certain who will show up in the sleepy northwestern Pennsylvania town of Edinboro, nor what form their dedication to the cult-favorite author of "Fight Club" might take.

"It's kinda weird," says Amy Dalton, coauthor of the Chuck Palahniuk.net Web site, one of the conference's sponsors, "because I'm a little bit afraid of some of these people. I try to think that they're just like me, and they're interested in this writer. But there're people on this other [online] message board who are really 'fight clubbing' it -- not like the guys on our board saying 'Why isn't there a fight club in Omaha?' These people are really doing it!"

Christian McKinney, the 22-year-old Edinboro University senior who is the main organizer of the conference, was similarly anxious in the days leading up to the event. At some of Palahniuk's recent speaking engagements, McKinney explains, the author has been asked disconcerting questions: "People were asking him, basically, to tell them how they should live their lives. And when he refused to tell them, they started shouting at him."

Susan Faludi coaches “Fight Club” author

Wed, 24 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

It was to be a meeting of two millennial media icons. Susan Faludi was reading from her new book on the disappointed and disenfranchised modern American male, "Stiffed," to a standing-room-only crowd at Powell's, Portland, Ore.'s massive indie bookstore. In the audience was Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel on the disappointed and disenfranchised modern American male, "Fight Club," had just opened in its film version. He and Faludi were planning to compare notes after the reading. As Palahniuk and I stood together (in a
section, as it turned out, of books on sailing, hunting and other manly pursuits), he showed me an article by Faludi in which she'd praised "Fight Club," calling it "the male 'Thelma and Louise.'"

“Fight Club”

Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

There's a pattern here -- every time Americans get really fat and self-satisfied, we start feeling miserable about ourselves. "Fight Club" is at least the third major Hollywood film of the year to hunt for the hidden meanings beneath our affluent consumer society, after "The Matrix" and "American Beauty." It introduces a memorable turn-of-the-century masculinity guru whom you might call the post-boomer generation's answer to Robert Bly. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a dissolute, mack-daddy hipster whose gospel includes such maxims as "You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not your khakis." Even the press kit handed out to reviewers of "Fight Club" is heavy with sanctimonious irony -- designed to resemble an upscale clothing and accessories catalog, it purports to offer sunglasses "inspired by styles favored by Pol Pot" and a '70s-style silk shirt "hand crafted in an Indonesian sweatshop by Frida, a single mother of seven whose monthly salary is equivalent to six American dollars."

Testosterama

Thu, 14 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"I think people are taking it way too seriously," said novelist Chuck Palahniuk at a Los Angeles press conference to promote the always dizzying, sometimes ditzy movie of his 1996 cult hit "Fight Club." Four years ago he pulled together this saga of disaffected drones who gather secretly in basements to whop the bejesus out of each other. The antiheroes' "fight club" is a primal men's group: These guys want to escape despair. But Palahniuk was not writing a prescription or a manifesto.

"It's a scenario; it's a what-if?; it's a proposal," Palahniuk insisted. He might have been mischievously signaling that he knew how radical his work really was. For "Fight Club" on film (as in print) is akin to the out-there satirical "proposal" that Jonathan Swift wrote when he suggested that the Irish could overcome their poverty if they sold their babies as food.

Of course, if I were facing a room of tired, testy radio journalists, I would have been tempted to present a full-blown position paper complete with polls and diagrams. There was a tense exhaustion in the air, as if the press didn't want to deal with a 139-minute movie that serves up, with equal panache, perfectly cooked and half-baked ideas.

Is it fistfighting, or just multi-tasking?

Wed, 13 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Chuck Palahniuk wrote the novel "Fight Club" as an affront
to the publishing houses that refused his first novel
because it was "too dark and too risky." But rather than tone down his
writing, he took it to the opposite extreme.

"I made it even darker and riskier and more offensive, all
the things that they didn't want," he said during a recent phone interview from his home
in Portland, Ore. "And I sent back 'Fight Club' because I thought, Well, they
wouldn't buy it, but at least they wouldn't forget it. And it turns out, boom -- they loved it."

The novel went on to win an Oregon Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers
Award, and eventually attracted the attention of David Fincher, director of the
atmospheric thriller "Seven." Fincher's adaptation of "Fight Club," starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton
and Helena Bonham Carter, opens Friday.

Movie makes “Fight Club” book a contender

Fri, 03 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

If you're skittish about tech stocks, invest your money in first-edition hardcovers of "Fight Club." Fox 2000's film version of Chuck Palahniuk's gritty novel will appear next month and will star Brad Pitt and Ed Norton. Specialty bookstores are already offering first editions of the book for up to $75 each.

"Prices for the book depend on the movie, and in this case everyone says good things about the movie," says Craig Graham, whose Los Angeles store, Vagabond Books, is selling a first edition of "Fight Club" for $70. "If it's a good movie, things can be kind of explosive." Another store, Positively Books in Portland, Ore., is selling a first edition, signed by the author, for $105.