Wonder Boys

Release date:February 22, 2000

Directed by:Curtis Hanson

Rated:

Runtime:111 minutes

Wonder Boys is a dark comedy film based on the 1995 novel of the same title by Michael Chabon. Directed by Curtis Hanson, it stars Michael Douglas as professor Grady Tripp, a novelist who teaches creative writing at an unnamed Pittsburgh university. He has been unable to finish his second novel,... his young wife has left him, and he is sleeping with the Chancellor of the university , who is the wife of the chairman of his department. Grady's editor is in town to take a look at the book and becomes interested in a book that a student from Grady's creative writing class has just completed. Wonder Boys was filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, including locations at Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, and Shady Side Academy. Other Pennsylvania locations included Beaver, Rochester and Rostraver Township. The film reunited Holmes and Maguire, who had appeared together three years earlier in The Ice Storm. After Wonder Boys failed at the box office, there was a second attempt to find an audience with a new marketing campaign and a November 8, 2000, re-release, which was also a financial disappointment.
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A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and... in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements , a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
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