Role: Hannah Green
Director: Curtis Hanson
Writers: Michael Chabon, Steve Kloves
Cast: Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr.
Relase Date: 25 February 2000
Runtime: 111 min
Distribution: Paramount Pictures

Full Synopsis:
On the day his third wife leaves him and his literary agent arrives to pressure him to finish a novel seven years in the writing, Carnegie Mellon professor, Grady Tripp, also learns that his married mistress is pregnant. Seven years before, with his first novel, he was a wonder boy. So was his agent. Both now need something. Over the weekend, instead of making choices, he vacillates in a pot-induced haze. One of his students, James Leer, perhaps stirs paternal feelings in Grady and raises homo-erotic urges in the agent. Academic politics complicate things: Grady’s mistress is the college chancellor, her husband chairs Grady’s department, James has just shot the husband’s dog. What to do?

Trivia:
Filmed in sequence.

The film was originally released in February of 2000 to almost universal praise (especially for the performance of Michael Douglas) but with very little fanfare. Paramount, the film’s distributor, decided to re-release the film that November with a different marketing campaign that highlighted its strong supporting cast, and hopes that it would garner some Oscar nominations, despite Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Friedman’s acknowledgment that no studio had ever successfully re-released a picture that initially flopped.

The term ‘Wonder Boys’, a derivative of the German ‘wunderkind’, refers to someone who has greatly succeeded in their profession or art at an early age.

Quotes:
Hannah Green: Grady, you know how in class you’re always telling us that writers make choices?
Grady Tripp: Yeah.
Hannah Green: And even though you’re book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it’s… it’s at times… it’s… very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone’s horses, and the dental records, and so on. And… I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all. And I was just wondering if it might not be different if… if when you wrote you weren’t always… under the influence.
Grady Tripp: Well… thank you for the thought, but shocking as it may sound, I am not the first writer to sip a little weed. Furthermore, it might surprise you to know that one book I wrote, as you say, “under the influence,” just happened to win a little something called the Pen Award. Which, by the way, I accepted under the influence.

Hannah Green: James will know about George Sanders.
James Leer: George Sanders?
Hannah Green: Mr. Crabtree was saying how George Sanders killed himself, only he couldn’t remember how.
James Leer: Pills. April 25, 1972, in a Costa Brava hotel room.
Terry Crabtree: How comprehensive of you.
Hannah Green: James is amazing. He knows all the movie suicides. Go ahead, James. Tell him.
James Leer: There are so many.
Hannah Green: Well, just a few. The big ones.
James Leer: Pier Angeli, 1971 or ’72, also pills. Donald “Red” Barry, shot himself in 1980. Charles Boyer, 1978, pills again. Charles Butterworth, 1946, I think. In a car. Supposedly, it was an accident, but, you know, he was distraught. Dorothy Dandridge, pills, 1965. Albert Dekker, 1968. He hung himself. He wrote his suicide note in lipstick on his stomach. William Inge, carbon monoxide, 1973. Carole Landis, pills again. I forget when. George Reeves, “Superman” on TV, shot himself. Jean Seberg, pills, of course, 1979. Everett Sloane – he was good – pills. Margaret Sullavan, pills. Lupe Velez, a lot of pills. Gig Young, he shot himself and his wife in 1978. There are tons more.
Hannah Green: I haven’t heard of half of them.
Terry Crabtree: You did them alphabetically.
James Leer: It’s just how my brain works, I guess.

Grady Tripp: All right. Let him crash at my house.
Hannah Green: Where should I put him?
Grady Tripp: In the shape that he’s in, you could stand him up in the garage next to the snow shovels and he’d be all right.