The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Film Adaptation

Film Adaptation

Producer Scott Rudin, who had worked with Chabon in the early nineties on The Gentlemen Host, a screenplay that as of 2007 remains unfilmed, bought the screen rights to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for Paramount Pictures based on a one-and-a-half page pitch before the novel had been published. (Rudin was involved with the novel so early on that his name appears in the acknowledgements to its first edition.) After the book was published, Rudin hired Chabon to write the screen adaptation. In July 2002, it was reported that the process had taken 16 months and six drafts, none of which pleased the demanding Rudin. "It's like those arcade games where a gopher head pops out", Chabon said at the time. "I fix this and then another head pops out." Rudin explained that his problems with the drafts often derived from scenes in the book he wanted kept in the film and which Chabon, "incredibly unprecious about his work", had cut.

In their 2002 It List, Entertainment Weekly declared Kavalier & Clay the year's "It Script", publishing a short excerpt from the screenplay. Chabon told the publication, "A lot of things about the book are really a pain in the neck ....The story takes place over this huge span of time. There's an 11-year gap in the middle when we don't see the characters at all. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay from memory, as if there were no novel at all and I were just remembering a story that I had heard.... Much less time passes in the movie than in the book. It's really just the period of the war." While at that point, the film was in active pre-production (with Sydney Pollack attached to direct and Jude Law in talks to play Kavalier), by late 2004 Chabon had declared the film project "very much dead".

In November of that same year, though, director Stephen Daldry announced in The New York Times that he planned to direct the film "next year." In January 2005, Chabon posted on his web site that, "about a month ago, there was a very brief buzzing, as of a fruit fly, around the film version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It was a casting-buzz. It went like this: Tobey Maguire as Sam Clay. Jamie Bell as Joe Kavalier. Natalie Portman as Rosa Saks. It buzzed very seriously for about eleven minutes. Then it went away." Actors Andrew Garfield, Ryan Gosling, Ben Whishaw and Jason Schwartzman were also possibly considered for parts in the project.

In June 2006, Chabon maintained that Portman was still "a strong likelihood for the part of Rosa", and listed a number of important plot points present in the book that would be left out of the movie. The list included the scene between Clay and Tracy Bacon in the ruins of the 1939 World's Fair (though the film will still feature a gay love story), the Long Island scene, and the appearances of Orson Welles and Stan Lee. Chabon added that "whether will move at last ... into really-truly pre-production, with a budget and cast and everything, will be decided on or around 12 July 2006." In August 2006, however, it was reported that the film had "not been greenlit". In April 2007, Chabon added that the project "just completely went south for studio-politics kinds of reasons that I'm not privy to.... Right now, as far as I know, there's not a lot going on."

In a December 2011 interview, Daldry stated that he was considering making a Kavalier & Clay adaptation as a television miniseries rather than a feature film, preferring to do it "on HBO as an eight-parter...If you could put that in the article and ring up HBO and tell them that’s what I wanna do, I’d really appreciate it."