First Look: Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke
David Fincher’s big screen adaptation of Fight Club is one of my favorite films of all time. The book and author behind the book are even better than that. I’ve been waiting for years for Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor to become a film. If there were a top 10 list of unadapted novels, Survivor would probably be in the top five, somewhere close to Catcher in the Rye.
The film rights to Palahniuk’s Fight Club follow-up were sold quickly, but the film will likely never be produced. September 11th happened. You see, the protagonist of the novel hijacks a civil airplane with plans to crash it. The book is about much more than that, but the hijacking is a main part of the climax of the story. Chuck recently announced during his most recent book tour that a film adaptation is still in the works, however I’m still very doubtful.
My third favorite Palahniuk novel is probably Choke. If you never want to read Choke, than don’t pick it up in a book store and start reading the first chapter. It might very well be the best opening chapter in terms of sucking you in.
Choke bookIn Clark Gregg’s directorial debut, Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini, who grew up going from one foster home to another after Victor’s mother (played by Angelica Huston) was found to be an unfit mother. Several times throughout his childhood his mother would kidnap him from his foster parents. But they would eventually be caught.
“Victor is now a man in his mid-twenties who left medical school in order to find work to support his mother who is now in a nursing home. He cannot afford the care that his mother is receiving so he resorts to being a con man. His “con” is to go to restaurants and midway through his meal, he forces himself to choke on his food. When some good Samaritan comes over to perform the Heimlich maneuver, he spits the food out and thanks them for saving his life. He keeps a detailed list of everyone who saves him and sends them frequent letters about fictional bills he is unable to pay. The people feel so sorry for him that they give him money, send him cards and letters asking about him how he’s doing, and even continue to send him money to help him with the bills.”
Choke will premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The first look photo above shows Victor sitting with his best friend Denny (played by Brad William Henke).
http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/12/01/first-look-chuck-palahniuk’s-choke/
I Am Legend Director Developing Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor Movie Adaptation
Two days ago I posted the first production photo from Choke, which premieres January at Sundance. But my posting was more of a rant about one of author Chuck Palahniuk’s other novels. Everyone knows about Fight Club (despite the first rule…), and everyone has seen David Fincher’s film adaptation, but what you probably don’t know is that Palahniuk wrote a book called Survivor that is arguably better than Fight Club.
Survivor
Survivor was being fast tracked for the big screen, but September 11th happened, and plot similarities put the project in development hell (you can read the history behind the failed film adaptation here). Online petitions were signed, Fox listened, and Chuck even announced at book signings that development work on the film had begun again. But not long after, it was reported that the project had fell back into development heck.
I’m writing to you today my friends to report some great news. I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence is back on the project.
“I’m working on the book Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk that I’m working on with a friend,” Lawrence said this weekend at the I Am Legend junket. “It’s a great book. I love that book. So we’ve been working on that.”
So it appears the project is not dead after all. Francis Lawrence has a couple other projects in development:
* ”Snow and the Seven” a 19th century re-telling of Snow White
* A pilot for NBC called “Kings”, David and Goliath in modern day New York City
But it sounds like he is actively working on an adaptation of Palahniuk’s book, and that makes me ecstatic.
Here is the plot description from the Book’s cover:
From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor.
“A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life.” –Newsday
“The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage,” according to the “been there, done that” wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk’s hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039’s “black box” in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback.
Not since Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak.
“Mordant…one’s sympathy for the improbable, doomed hero is fully engaged.” –The New Yorker
“A wild amphetamine ride through the vagaries of fame and the nature of belief.”–The San Francisco Chronicle
“Convoluted, maniacally comic, partaking deeply of the America that streams towrd us in the dead of night from the cable channels–that place of outrageous expectation, slavish idolatry, fanatic consumerism, and mind-stopping banality.” –Sven Birkerts, Esquire
http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/12/03/i-am-legend-director-developing-chuck-palahniuks-survivor-movie/
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")