'Fight Club' writer had long wait for filming of another book

George Lang, The Oklahoman

Published: October 1, 2008

Nearly a decade passed between the film version of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" and Clark Gregg's adaptation of "Choke" — a long time considering the popularity of Palahniuk's novels and the heat generated by David Fincher's 1999 film. Palahniuk enthusiastically encouraged studios to option his stories, but then real-life events got in the way.

"Even as 'Fight Club' was in production, David Fincher had pressured 20th Century Fox into optioning my second book, 'Survivor,' and Fox had hired Jake Paltrow, Gwyneth Paltrow's brother, to write the screenplay, and they were at the point of casting it," Palahniuk said in a recent phone interview. "It looked like the movies were going to roll out as fast as I could write the books. Then 9/11 happened."

"Survivor" did not get made because the lead character, Tender Branson, hijacks a commercial airliner and crashes it in the Australian Outback. Palahniuk said the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, cast a pall over adaptations of his work altogether. Transgressive humor was a hard sell for years.

But then Gregg, a writer and character actor best known for writing the 2000 Harrison Ford-Michelle Pfeiffer thriller "What Lies Beneath" and for starring in the CBS sitcom "The New Adventures of Old Christine," approached Palahniuk about adapting "Choke." The novel, centered on a sex addict's search for his genetic origins while trying to find a cure for his mother's insanity and choking in restaurants to extract cash from his gullible saviors, offered strong comic possibilities, to say the least.

Palahniuk, a former print journalist whose most recent novel, "Snuff," was published in May, said that Gregg spent six years writing and filming "Choke," which stars Sam Rockwell as choke artist Victor Mancini. While he was in casual contact with Gregg as the film was made, Palahniuk said it was important to stay out of the way.

"A lot of telephone calls back and forth and a couple of letters, but I kind of, in a way, didn't want to push him in any direction," said Palahniuk, who lives and works in Vancouver, Wash. "The process of developing a film is so long and so exhausting, in addition to whatever full-time work he was doing to pay the bills, that unless this project really expressed some part of him and he really adopted it, it was never going to get done. So ... I told him to change the story as much as he needed to."

A key motif in most Palahniuk stories is the human compulsion to join groups. In "Fight Club" it was disease support groups and the anarchist society Project Mayhem. In his recent novel "Rant," a dystopian future society has divided into "daytimers" and "nighttimers," while groups engage in the car-to-car combat known as "party crashing," and teens actively try to get infected in a rabies epidemic.

Palahniuk said the groups he writes about, whether they are cults, support groups or bands of car crashers, are places where people can belong and share the things they wouldn't talk about with their families or friends.

"All these sort of transgressive or subculture places are where people go to tell stories in which they don't look good," he said. "They're places of confession, where people risk talking about the worst parts of their lives in hoping to achieve forgiveness and community with other people."

These days, most of Palahniuk's novels are in some level of development as films, including "Rant," and he is working on two more novels based on that story's time-traveling rabies carrier, Buster "Rant" Casey. As for "Choke," he said he couldn't be happier with the onscreen results.

"I really, really loved it — I've seen it three times now, and it kind of hits me a different way every time I see it," Palahniuk said. "I think Clark has made the characters a lot more sympathetic and touching, vulnerable, than I did."

Comments