George Clooney Saved My Novel

by Walter Kirn Info

Walter Kirn is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and his work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Time, New York, GQ and Esquire. He is the author of six previous works of fiction: My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, Mission to America and The Unbinding. Kirn is a graduate of Princeton University and attended Oxford on a scholarship from the Keasby Foundation. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

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Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air is flying high on Oscar buzz—but it almost never made it to the screen. How the film’s director, star, and a twist of fate saved the project from extinction.

Last summer, I did something I hadn’t thought possible: I sat down in a private Beverly Hills screening room and viewed, with pleasure, terrifying pleasure, a just-short-of-finished version of a movie based on a novel that I’d published eight years earlier and watched disappear just two months afterward.

Up in the Air, I’d titled the book, both for its setting (airplanes, airports, airport hotels) and for the plight of its hero, Ryan Bingham, a rootless, restless management consultant who specializes in firing corporate workers whose bosses aren’t able to do the deed themselves, and who soothes his bad conscience by hoarding frequent-flier miles and their many perks. The story, which I started writing at the peak of the dot-com mania, was conceived, in part, as a morality tale about the spiritual distortions forced upon people by techno-capitalism. It was also a satirical treatment of the drive to pile up useless wealth. But mostly it was a character study of someone (or a class of someones) who I felt was invisible in literature despite being all around me in real life: the pretzel-eating, mini-bar-raiding nomad, his existence pared down to a single carry-on, but his soul the same size as everyone else’s.

• The Daily Beast’s Complete Oscar CoverageThe book received some good reviews and sold at a brisk clip—at first. But then, on the morning I was set to fly to New York for its publication party, it stopped doing well, as did many other things, on September 11, 2001. It’s a date that only a narcissistic writer who’d just come out with a novel could remember for anything other than its legacy of toppled towers, vaporized humanity, and the outbreak of a long, long war.

Though Up in the Air stopped selling instantly (its eye-catching cover didn’t help: a cartoon of flying businesspeople, one of them on fire and hurtling earthward), a movie studio had hired me three weeks earlier to turn the book into a screenplay. The studio honored the contract despite the cataclysm that, it was universally agreed, would prevent such a film from ever being made. I turned in the script, took my check, and went away. The studio dropped its option on the novel, and Ryan Bingham’s fate was sealed, it seemed—he’d be entombed in my mind forever after, in the same secret spot where he was born.

A couple of years passed. And then, in a reversal (a reverse reversal, actually) that wouldn’t have seemed remotely plausible if I’d put it in a novel, what had come down began to go back up. The ascent commenced with a brief email from Jason Reitman, a thirtyish film director who, at the time he wrote me, was not well known, but would soon become famous for his first two movies: Thank You for Smoking and Juno. He was writing a script from my novel, he informed me, and would get back in touch when he was finished. Right. Heard that one. Though another one of my novels, Thumbsucker, had by then become an indie, I knew from experience—my own and others’—that when Hollywood promises to get back to you, it’s best not to wait by the phone. You’ll starve to death.

Then, two years later, Reitman’s script arrived. I read it in one sitting. And though I texted him to say I liked it—which I really did, in large part for the liberties it took to open up Ryan’s story for the screen and to allow Reitman to inject his own concerns into a tale that was amply stuffed with mine—I still felt the material was cursed and suspected that the project would end there. I was wrong. Some months later, just over a year ago, I rolled over in bed, naked, and switched on my BlackBerry to punish a girlfriend who’d switched on hers just moments after sex (the first time I’d ever suffered this modern impertinence but far from the last). My newest message beat hers, as it turned out. According to an article in Variety forwarded to me by a friend, George Clooney was engaged in serious talks to breathe big-screen life into Ryan Bingham’s cadaver.