Word: comical
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Ghost World originated in Eightball, a serial comic book by Daniel Clowes, whose anatomizing of anomie--Pussey!, David Boring--has made him the R. Crumb of Generation Y. (The Ghost World title is graffiti Clowes saw on a wall in Chicago.) Enid and Rebecca first appeared in 1993. "The characters came to me spontaneously, fully formed, when I drew them in my sketchbook," says Clowes in his Oakland, Calif., home. "They felt like two parts of my personality. Enid is the id, dissatisfied with everything, not sure where she belongs; Rebecca is more pragmatic, trying to make the best...
...have stayed on the page if not for Terry Zwigoff, best known for Crumb, his 1994 documentary on the cartoonist. Eager to direct a fiction feature, the San Francisco filmmaker got in touch with Clowes to work on Ghost World. At first, they tried a close adaptation of the comic. "It wasn't working," Clowes says. "We were sustaining the corpse of something. So we took little tangents and enlarged them, and took things that were large in the comic and shrank them down to tangents. It was changed at the atomic level." Clowes remained an active force during...
Zwigoff's major contribution to the script was the fleshing out of Seymour, a minor character in the comic. Zwigoff took aspects from Robert Crumb and his brother Charles, but mainly, the director says, "he was based on me." It was easier to write the character than to get the studio bosses' approval of the actor to play him. "I fought and fought to have Steve Buscemi. We could have made this film four years earlier if I'd agreed to cast the people they were giving me, like Freddie Prinze Jr.--people who were absurd for the part. Also...
Rowen sparkled, seeming at ease with both the ridiculous and the more subtle comic moments, particularly shining in the reprise of “Lovely” and in his own solo, “I’m Calm...
Forum, while an ensemble piece, also has an indisputable leading player, Pseudolus, who has been enthusiastically tackled on Broadway by comic greats ranging from Zero Mostel to Phil Silvers to Nathan Lane...