LJWorld.com

• Email
• iPod-friendly
• Print

While history and prestigious novels like "Corelli's Mandolin" have inspired a lot of movies this year, it's interesting to note that a comic book adaptation is quickly becoming one of the best received films on the market. "Ghost World" Director Terry Zwigoff's ("Crumb") adaptation of Daniel Clowes' comic strip, has charmed critics and moviegoers with its tale of two girls, Enid Coleslaw (Thora Birch) and her buddy Rebecca (Scarlett Johannson), whose friendship falls apart after they leave high school. It finally opens in Kansas City this week.

"When people use the pejorative about, 'This has a comic book script to it,' I'm always sort of insulted," says Clowes, speaking from his home in Oakland, Calif. "It's more like they should be reading comics and saying, 'This has a Hollywood movie script to it.'"

Clowes' comic book Ghost World first introduced the character of Enid Coleslaw.

"Ghost World," which was backed by the British film company Granada, is atypical of Tinseltown fare. Like its source material, the picture has an ambiguous ending and features actors who, with the possible exception of supporting player Brad Renfro, don't normally grace teen magazines (which are ridiculed in the comic). Like the principal characters in a lot of recent youth fare, Enid and Rebecca are fashionably cynical, but there's an important distinction.

"I've seen a lot of movies, like 'Reality Bites' and the Kevin Smith movies, which have these characters that are sort of similar to Enid and Rebecca except that they are so hateful," Clowes says. "I hate them all so much. Partly it's because they're not real. They're just characters that are in your face. It's heavily scripted. There's no depth to it at all.

"Most of the reason Enid works is because Thora brought such a depth to the character. She could have played it in such a flat, sarcastic way, and it would have ruined it. She could have been just an obnoxious brat. If you'd only known her from Enid and you'd see her now, only the eyes look the same. She put on weight, got a haircut that she didn't find particularly flattering and put on glasses. That's something an 18-year-old girl normally doesn't want to do. They're often very conscious of their looks, especially if they're actresses. I almost feel Enid was really alive while we were making the film and then turned back into Thora," he says.

Product placement

The 40-year-old Clowes has an obvious affinity for the bluntly outspoken teen-age character (her name is a partial anagram of Clowes' own). Nonetheless, he explains that an otherness about Enid made her eventually become the star of the comic and the movie.

"When I first started the strip, I wanted them to be equals, and then Enid kind of emerged as being slightly more interesting to me. It's probably because I'm more like Rebecca in person, so Enid's more exotic to me, the way I wish I could be, more than Rebecca is," he explains.

If there is anything of Enid in "Ghost World," it may be reflected in the weird anti-product placement attitude that runs through the film. A careful listener will hear ads for eerily authentic sounding phony products.

"After we finished the film and we were doing the sound, we decided we needed these TV commercials in the background," Clowes recalls. "We were going to use these stock commercials, but we couldn't find anything that was resonant or funny. Then we found something that we liked, but we couldn't afford it. Every bit of sound you hear is something we wrote. I wrote this 15-minute bad sitcom that's actually pretty funny. I wish people could hear it, but it's all played under the dialogue."

Clowes understands a bit about commercials because he designed cans for Coca-Cola's ill-fated OK Soda. When asked how the mysterious beverage tasted, he recalls, "It was not good, which is why the product failed. It was sort of a mixture of Mountain Dew and Cherry Coke. It was really grotesque. At the time I couldn't get over the idea that I could design a can that could be in supermarkets. I never got to see it. It never made it to California."

Another of his designs, the poster for Todd Solondz's ironically titled film "Happiness," wound up being his first foray into filmmaking.

"That's where a lot of people first discovered my work. I'd seen the film and really liked the Philip Seymour Hoffman character the best, so I made him the biggest. If I ever meet him, I always feel he owes me a drink for making him the star of the movie because he really isn't," Clowes says.

A second look

Clowes also is happy with his new title as screenwriter. He and Zwigoff collaborated on the script, which has also been published, and he was given the rare privilege of on-set input.

He says, "(As a screenwriter), you get about the same respect as the caterer. I was there on the set when they were making the film, and I had no intention of not being there. People would come up to me and say, 'I never met the writer of one of my films, and I've done 25 films.'"

Writing comics would seem an effortless transition, but Clowes, who had originally planned on only drawing the storyboards, says, "The rhythm and the way the story is told in pictures is different in film. If you take a film that's very visually exciting like a Hitchcock film, he had very detailed storyboards. If you read them as narrative, it's the most dull thing in the world. It's just a different language. They're similar but very distant."

For somebody who has received so much acclaim with an unfairly derided medium, it's interesting to note the worlds he creates in "Ghost World" and his graphic novel "David Boring" are nearing their demises.

"That's something that runs through almost all of my comics. People have asked me about it. I have no real explanation for it except for that it is clearly part of my psychological makeup that I have this kind of apprehension that things are spiraling out of control all the time," Clowes says.

He's just finished another set of stories and pictures for "Eightball," his semiannual comic where he introduced the "Ghost World" and "David Boring" strips. He says his old fans approve of the film, but adds, "I've talked to a lot of people who say that the first time they see it, they're expecting their favorite scenes. When (those scenes) don't come, they're kind of distracted. They weren't paying attention to the movie they're actually seeing. They often say they like it better the second time."