Apology of a Rudin ApologistIn a nearly 1,400-word essay posted today on“I heard stories of Scott’s tantrums and vindictiveness, but not of smashed hands and people pushed out of moving cars,” writes Chabon, whose first screenplay was optioned by Rudin in 1994. “But I knew enough.
“I regret most of all that Kevin Graham-Caso is not here for me to tell him personally how sorry I am,” Chabon writes. “Looking back through the emails he sent, arranging my travel and phone meetings with his volatile and unpredictable boss, remembering his voice on the phone, I can see and hear him walking on eggshells, taking the absurdly deferential, almost Victorian tone Scott insisted his assistants take with ‘the talent.
Chabon’s novel chronicles the lives of two cousins, a Czech artist and and his Brooklyn-born cousin, as they become major figures in the WWII-era Golden Age of comic book publishing. Spanning decades and geography and encompassing a head-spinning mix of popular culture, the Holocaust, gay rights, real-life events and fictional alternative history,is generally regarded as Chabon’s masterpiece, with Hollywood repeatedly attempting to wrestle the work into a film or TV adaptation.
In today’s essay, Chabon says that he himself was the target of Rudin’s “fury, vitriol and vituperation” in 2010 when the two had a dispute over the terms of a deal. Despite “a series of potent Rudin email bombs packed with nails, razor blades and personal insults,” theWrites Chabon, “It wasn’t until some five years later, when he began – behind our backs – to demean and shit-talk my wife, that I finally drew a line, and resolved not to work with him again.
During the 20 intermittent years of his professional relationship with Rudin, Chabon says, “I sat there as he dished it out to people who, over that period, grew ever younger, until any of them might have been one of my own children with a right to expect, or at least to hope, that I might use my voice, my privilege, my authority as a white man, as a person Scott respected, even as a father, to protect them, to speak up on their behalf, to say something like, ‘Hey, Scott, take it easy on the...
Was especially sorry to learn here about what happened to his own wife, because her book Bad Mother helped one of my dear ones get through a rough patch of family life a few years back.
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Oh well. Now that he’s written this after dirt has already been thrown into Rudin’s professional grave he can feel like he did something. Coward.