Essence of a grump

During the question-and-answer period after a rapturously received screening of “American Splendor” at the recent Sundance Film Festival, an audience member asked the film’s subject, curmudgeonly underground comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, if he still felt as hopeless as he seemed in the movie.

“I feel more hopeful than I did 24 hours ago,” he said grudgingly.

One can only wonder how he felt a few days later, when the film won the festival’s top award, the Grand Jury Prize, topping a very respectable field of feature films. Or a few weeks later, when the HBO Films production was picked up for distribution this summer by Fine Line Features. Did he feel better than hopeful? Did he actually feel good?

Not likely. It would be way out of character, a character that Pekar has chronicled for the last 25 years in a comic-book series, also called “American Splendor,” about his miserable life in Cleveland as a clerk in a Veterans Affairs hospital, his money problems, his petty irritations, his monomaniacal obsessions, his weird friends and colleagues, his rocky marriage, his unexpected parenthood and his bout with cancer. In short, it’s an ode, or a dirge, to the Everyman.

It’s also an unlikely subject for a comic book -- and for a movie. After all, both mediums normally traffic in heroes. “I write about people who don’t get written about ordinarily, unless they commit an ax murder,” Pekar says. “I think everybody is real interesting.”

The trick, of course, is to find a way to make audiences share this interest. Pekar managed it with black humor, relentless honesty, comic-book tropes and the assistance of a host of illustrators, including Robert Crumb. (Pekar doesn’t draw; he writes the material first and then it’s illustrated.) Filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who together wrote and directed the movie, tackled the problem by employing a variety of techniques, including traditional narrative, animation, voice-over, TV footage and interviews, not to mention the crummy, stubborn spirit of the comics.

“It’s scary sometimes,” Pulcini says. “I see all the ways it could have gone wrong. Casting. If that didn’t work, the movie would collapse. If those transitions between Paul and Harvey didn’t work, I don’t see why you watch the movie.”

Pulcini is referring to the fact that the real Pekar appears as himself in the movie and narrates scenes from his life as acted by Paul Giamatti, who doesn’t look like him but somehow manages to suggest him. The filmmakers made this easier to accept by placing the two Pekars in radically different contexts. Giamatti inhabits the gritty Rust Belt Cleveland of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Pekar is shown talking against a white studio backdrop with carefully placed objects that deliberately mimic a comic-book frame.

It’s also clear that the dramatized bits are projections of Pekar rather than realistic depictions of him, much as his comics are (in which, incidentally, he is drawn in different ways by different artists). The filmmakers and Giamatti are the first to say that they were adapting his comics, not his life.

Of course, as well thought out as all of this is, it’s not going to work if the audience doesn’t embrace Pekar and his world. He is, in Berman’s words, “a pain in the butt” and “sometimes you want to strangle him,” but he also represents the kind of person we all are or fear we may become, the man stuck in a dead-end job. It doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Giamatti, a sympathetic on-screen presence.

Long time coming

Clearly, it’s a minor miracle that a movie like this got made. (“If people thought about this movie for too long,” says Pulcini, “they’d find a lot of reasons not to make it.”) According to Pekar, the idea of doing a film based on “American Splendor” has been kicking around for more than 20 years. He was approached by a number of interested parties in the early ‘80s, including Jonathan Demme, “but they could never get the dough together.”

Finally, in 1998, an illustrator friend put Pekar’s wife, Joyce Brabner, in touch with Good Machine’s Ted Hope, a longtime fan. Hope purchased the rights to the material, but it wasn’t until early 2001 that he found the right filmmakers for the job, the husband-and-wife team of Pulcini and Berman, documentarians (“Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s”) who also have written a couple of pending biopics (on Mexican bandleader Esquivel and Hollywood restaurateur Prince Michael Romanoff).

The directors say they fell in love with Pekar’s comics and the tapes of Pekar’s notorious ‘80s appearances on television with David Letterman that Hope sent them (Letterman allowed the filmmakers to use these tapes in the film, except for an appearance in which Pekar went after Letterman’s corporate benefactors). They then pitched the project around town, ultimately eliciting interest from HBO, and wrote the script in three weeks to beat an impending writer’s strike. In the process, they got to know Pekar and Brabner.

“The biggest thing he asked us was, ‘Please don’t make me some Hollywood hero, a fake character,’ ” Berman says. “He wanted us to be honest about him.”

Giamatti didn’t have this conversation with Pekar, but he was concerned about patronizing him and his friends, either by ridiculing them or by putting them on a pedestal, which he says amounts to the same thing.

Pulcini says Giamatti and Pekar have an almost spiritual connection, though Giamatti, who admits they have similar interests (reading, sports), talks about him in peculiarly physical terms. “He’s got a weird kind of restraint going on, an interesting kind of stillness about him,” says Giamatti, who’s best known for his roles in such films as “The Truman Show,” “Private Parts” and “Big Fat Liar.”

“For a weirdly put-together guy, he’s really physically present. You’d think he’d be all over the map because he’s neurotic, but he’s actually graceful. He was a really good athlete when he was younger. He’s physically imposing. He’s very erect.” In a sense, Giamatti plays the inner Pekar, the dumpy, nonathletic nebbish.

Hope Davis, on the other hand, who plays Brabner, was much more interested in capturing her character’s real-life qualities, especially her formidable manner. This was on display during the post-screening Q&A;, when Brabner quietly cut to pieces an audience member who asked why the name of the father of their adoptive daughter was changed, adding sarcastically, “The pedestrians in the movie aren’t accurate either.”

“She is scary, man,” says Davis, who adds that Brabner made it clear that she is not thrilled with the way she’s been depicted in the comics. “The first time I met her I was overwhelmed by her and her story of her life and her story of meeting Harvey. She can be very intimidating in that she wants to bore into you. And she has no boundaries. When you meet someone, you don’t talk about bodily functions.”

Mellowed? Maybe

Appropriately enough, the shoot itself, conducted over 24 days in Cleveland in November 2001, was grim, weird and funny. Pekar and Brabner visited the set, often just to grab a free meal, and the filmmakers had the strange sense of doppelgangers hanging around. Davis, who had sneezing fits because of the moldy thrift-store clothes she had to wear, says she and Giamatti had trouble keeping it together during their scenes -- for example, when they first meet and Pekar says, “Look, you should know right off the bat that I’ve had a vasectomy.”

Pekar pronounces himself happy, if that’s not too strong a word for him, with the movie. There is always room for improvement, of course.

He’s 63 years old and has had a second bout with cancer. He’s retired and lives off his pension. He tries to augment his income with comics, but they don’t make much money, and his other writing assignments (jazz and book reviews) have dried up because of the economy. He contends, however, that he’s mellowed with age. Some observers might disagree.

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Harvey, and I’d say he’s a curmudgeon 90% of the time,” Berman says. “He came to New York to visit us, and he needed to do a half-hour of re-voice, very little time, and he just put his head down on the desk and went to sleep. He grumbled, ‘Why did you put me in a nice hotel? You should have just given me the money and put me in a hostel.’ ”