Producer Scott Rudin is a notoriously difficult person to work for (that’s putting it diplomatically, we knew a friend who used to work for him) and Gawker put him on their worst horrible bosses list a few years back, but the man has undeniably good taste, so when he picks up a project, we listen.
According to Deadline, he’s acquired the film rights to Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” which doesn’t hit book shelves until until August 31. Heralded for his 2002 novel, “The Corrections,” according to the trade the new novel chronicles “the slowly disintegrating relationship of Patty and Walter Berglund, socially conscious college sweethearts, who lose each other and their own moral compasses over the years to temptations both corporate and carnal.”
Sounds like a good humanist drama for any number of young, humanist directors ala a Jason Reitman, but who knows, this writer has obviously not read it yet, but Rudin has great instincts and will probably find a great filmmaker and cast for it. It’s what he does best. Here’s the Amazon synopsis:
“The awful thing about life is this:” says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir’s Rules of the Game. “Everyone has his reasons.” That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it’s very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than St. Louis). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues–among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock’n’roll–and in some ways can’t be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them.
Rudin’s already won a producing Oscars for “No Country for Old Men,” was nominated for “The Hours” and has his hand in many projects. Upcoming films under his aegis include “The Social Network,” “Moneyball, “True Grit,” and “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.” Modern classic films (relative) he’s been involved in are numerous including, “There Will Be Blood,” “Clueless,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and every Wes Anderson film since, “Zoolander,” most of Noah Baumbach’s project since “Margot At The Wedding,” “I Heart Huckabees” and many more. Franzen is on the cover of Time magazine today, so it’s all pretty great timing for the author.