Word: pekar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Giamatti and Hope Davis opens next week and may be the most ambitious film adaptation of a comic ever attempted. Co-directors and script-writers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini combine re-enactments with animation and documentary footage of the real people being played in the movie - including Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner - sometimes putting the actors and their real-life counterparts in the same frame. Giamatti gives a hilariously simian characterization of Pekar as he struggles to find meaning in his life. Essentially a story about the redemptive power of art, Pekar's comix lead...
...Pekar: First of all I was familiar with them from reading them as a kid. I was familiar with the form. I used to collect them like a madman when I was an elementary school kid. But I got sick of them. I just thought they got predictable after a while, the stuff I was reading - the superhero stuff. So I just thought there was something limited about the medium itself. You could only do so much with it. I think a lot of people think that about comics. I sort of kept an eye open. I liked "Mad" comics...
...Pekar: What happened was that in 1962 I met Robert Crumb. He moved to Cleveland, and initially we had in common jazz record collecting. He showed me some of the stuff he was working on including this graphic novel called "The Big Yum Yum Book." I was very impressed with [the book] and it started to dawn on me that you could do anything in comics that you could do in other mediums. And I started to wonder, 'Why hasn't this been done before? Why haven't they done realistic comics?' It's just because people had no confidence...
...Pekar: I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It exited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions. So I decided I would do that and see if I could maybe come up with an artist. And I was paying attention to what the underground cartoonists were doing in the sixties and the early seventies. Crumb moved out of Cleveland...
...Pekar: It's just autobiographical writing. That's what it is - my take on everything...