Bombay California [Paperback]

Mark Axelrod (Author), Andrezj Piotrowski (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 1996

Though the novel is replete with characters from Paul Bunyan to Jimmy Carter, the main character is Oliveira Katz an Argentine-American novelist who is clearly more American than Argentine, but who uses his "Latino-ness" whenever it suits his purpose. Otherwise, he's clearly a gringo. But Katz is at his best when (under the Argentine guise) he criticizes U.S. culture. The "veil of foreign-ness" (regardless of thickness) allows him to take any number of "objective shots" at the U.S. media, government, etc. all with a certain amount of impunity. Literary impunity. But he is obviously a part of the culture he criticizes and no matter what posture he takes, the overwhelming influence of the USA affects everyone who comes within its grasp. Katz is no different. All the other characters in the novel, merely play counterpoint to Katz's worldview. Even in the screenplay that is imbedded within the novel, Ollie is merely an extension of Oliveira and all the other characters are modeled after other characters. The notion of repetition is as important to the novel (and to the characters) as it is to the Hollywood film industry. In a way, Oliveira's return to the U.S. (a repetition of sorts) and his departure (yet another repetition) underscores the position of the artist in society as being in a state of constant flux. First in the US, then in Argentina, then back in the US, then back to Argentina (with the caveat that they maintain an apartment in the States, like Borges) only augments the theme of the "eternal wanderer." Katz is clearly puzzled by the U.S., a country with enormous potential and yet a country with an "eye" (perhaps the CBS one) devoted to its own dissolution. Unable to understand its history, the US is constantly attempting to destroy and rebuild it. Katz, a man of two worlds (the "new" world and the "third" world) does understand that and uses history (e.g. American folklore) to integrate the past into the present for fear of losing it altogether.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

MARK AXELROD is a Full Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Chapman University, Orange, California. A graduate of both Indiana University and the University of Minnesota, he is the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, he is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing, a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has published four novels, Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994)) and has finished a new, thousand-page Pan-American novel titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, based on the character created by the 19th century Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, excerpts of which have been anthologized in The Reading Room/4 published by Green Marsh Press. He has also written several collections of short stories titled: Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage (to be published by Fiction Collective 2 in April, 2004); Balzac’s Coffee, Rembrandt’s Café (the sequel); Dante’s Foil & Other Sporting Tales and The Apotheosis of Aaron and has been published in numerous journals including the Iowa Review, the New Novel Review and the New York Quarterly. A contributor to the former New York avant-garde magazine, Splash, he was a film reviewer for Vinyl Magazine (Minneapolis) and a music reviewer for Playboy. Among the awards he has won for his fiction include: the Tim McGinnis Award (University of Iowa); Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Fiction Writing, Cassis, France (2); the Maxwell Perkins Award for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an Award for Experimental Writing (Indiana University). He has also won an award from Western Illinois University for his play, TI AMO LUCIA OLIVETTI, which is tentatively scheduled to be staged at the Jewish Theatre of Hamburg (Fall, 2003) and is currently working on a new play dealing with the life of Van Gogh. His critical books include, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortázar (Macmillan, UK, 1990); The Poetics of Novels (Macmillan, UK, 1999) and is currently at work on a book titled Mismatch Dissolve: The Adaptation of Postmodern Fiction to Film. Other film books include: Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001); Character & Conflict: Cornerstones of Screenwriting (also being considered by Heinemann) and I Read It At the Movies: Screen Adaptation. His translations of Xavier de Maistre’s novella, Un voyage autour de ma chambre and Balzac’s play, Mercadet, will both be published by Green Integer Press in 2003 and 2004 respectively and he is co-translating the novel, Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, written by the Argentine novelist, Macedonio Fernandez.

He is a practicing screenwriter and has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute. He has written over twenty screenplays and teleplays and his adaptation and co-production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "An Author’s Mother" won awards from the Scottish Association of Filmmakers, the London International Film & Video Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Video do Algarve, Portugal. He has taught or conducted screenwriting seminars and workshops throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United Kingdom as well as the United States including stints at: the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba [the school founded by García Márquez]; the Goethe Institute, Santiago, Chile (with Antonio Skármeta [author of Il Postino]); with both SICA, the Cinematographer’s Union of Argentina, and Proyectos Culturales in Buenos Aires; at the National Film School of Denmark, Copenhagen; the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland; the Gri

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THE OPTION

45. INT. OLIVEIRA'S BANK-SAME DAY

Recently (actually as I was finishing this novel) I sold an option on the film rights to Bombay, California to Parshiveh Production Company, Los Angeles. Seems they had heard about this novel through some Brazilian friends of mine who had some connections with a French filmmaker (a distant relation of Mlis) who knew a cinematographer who once studied with Nykvist and who once worked for a friend of Bergman's who had sexual relations with one of Fassbinder's secretaries whose ex-lover had once been a hair stylist for an extra in Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover before giving up film and working for a Japanese toy manufacturer whose Italian villa was used in the off-season by Scola's next door neighbor whose maid's aunt once attended a pig roast given by Fellini and met the cousin of an Argentine pit bull breeder whose ex-wife's ex-husband had shared a meal with Jean Renoir's postal carrier whose American cousin had an ex- student who worked at Farrar, Straus, Giroux and whose brother-in-law's maid once worked for one of Jeffrey Katzenberg's rabbis (now deceased) whose brother's banker played handball at a Sherman Oaks racquet club with the creative director of Parshiveh Productions. Hence the connection.

They read the opening chapter of the novel and were so impressed by it and by the fact that Gallimard was interested in publishing it in France they offerred me $10,000 for a one- year option with an option to option an additional year at another $10,000. I thought it curious that (up until that time) I had not optioned any of my screenplay ideas, but had optioned a novel-in-progress for what, I thought, was a huge sum of money. As I was to find out (also while finishing this novel, but, unfortunately, subsequent to signing the option) 10K in Hollywood terms translates to just so much excess film left scattered on a cutting room floor. But I was rather fascinated with the idea of adapting my own novel to the screen and had asked the director of creative development how he intended to take Bombay, California and cinematize it.

"Easy," he said. "We scrap all the chapters that are impossible or cost prohibitive to adapt, rewrite the plot so it conforms to the Hollywood methodicum, cast a bankable star for the lead and throw out what's left."

"But, but then it's not my work," I said, not a little dismayed by how he so whimsically had devastated my material.

"Of course not. Don't be stupid. It's a film, not a novel."

"But why not call it something else if it's something else. If it's not going to be Bombay, California then retitle it...Sunset Boulevard or..."

"Listen, Oliveira, we want to play off the commercialization of your book. Once it comes out in paperback it'll be packaged in such a way that whomever plays the lead will grace the cover. Like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman or Connery in The Name of the Rose. That way the reading public will automatically correlate the figure on the cover with the figure in the book which will indelibly affect how they read and perceive the character and will condition them for the movie. Now and forever."

I really hadn't thought about that, in those terms, those commercial terms, but it was true. No matter how many times I read Fowles and Burgess and Eco, Sarah Woodruff was always Meryl Streep; Malcolm MacDowell always Alex; Baskerville always Connery. The thought was somehow disconsoling. It was even more McLuhan than McLuhan. It was certainly more Eco than Eco.

"So, what you're saying is it's really a matter of profit."

"Exactly. This is the movie industry, Oliveira, we're in the business of entertainment."

"And art?"

"Fuck art."

"But what about the spirit of the work. Its adaptative integrity."

"Oliveira, I hate to break this to you, but Orson Welles is dead."

"Right."

Not only was Orson Welles dead, but so were my chances of writing the script to my own novel. He already had a writer in mind.

"Who?"

"Fleischman Nagel."

"Who?"

"Fleischman Nagel."

"Who's he?"

"He's hot. Top of the rock, king of the hill. He's an A writer."

I recalled the alphabeticalness of that from my previous discussions with a producer in Chapter 42.

"But why can't I adapt it. It's mine!"

"It's simple, Oliveira. You'll do something literary with it and in the end it'll be artistic, but it won't sell worth a shit."

"Oh."

"Let me put it in terms you'll understand, Oliveira."

"What?"

"Luis Buuel es muerto."

Luis Buuel es muerto. Luis Buuel c'est mort. In any language, he's dead. Long live Buuel.

Cut.

Print.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Pacific Writers Press; 2 edition (October 2, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0944870066
• ISBN-13: 978-0944870068
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,573,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Axelrod is a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at Chapman University, Orange, California. Prior to teaching at Chapman, he taught at the University of East Anglia, UK and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. A graduate of both Indiana University (BA, MA) and the University of Minnesota (PhD) [Dissertation: The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Beckett, Balzac and Cortázar]. For fourteen years he has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing for which he has received 4 National Endowment Arts Grants. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing (University of East Anglia, Edinburgh University), a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has written over 20 works of fiction including Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994) and Secret Histories: Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage (fc2, 2005) which was published in fall, '09 in Spanish by Thule Ediciones, Barcelona as Viajes Borges, Talleres Hemingway and is currently under consideration with Grupo Editorial in Rio de Janeiro. Other books are being considered for translation in Italy.
A partial listing of his fiction writing includes: his Pan-Euro-American trilogy titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, based on the character Braz Cubas created by the 19th century Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, has been anthologized in The Reading Room/4 published by Great Marsh Press. In addition to Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage which received excellent reviews in the New York Times, the Georgia Review and Publisher's Weekly, among others, he has written three other additional Secret Histories including: Balzac's Coffee, DaVinci's Ristorante; Nietzsche's Café, Axel's Charhouse and Bartleby's Books, Gatsby's Café. He has written other short fiction as well including Dante's Foil & Other Sporting Tales and The Apotheosis of Aaron. He has been published in numerous national and international literary journals including the Iowa Review and the New York Quarterly and was a contributor to the former New York avant-garde magazine, Splash Magazine. Among the awards he has won for his fiction include: the Tim McGinnis Award (University of Iowa); Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Fiction Writing, Cassis, France (2); the Maxwell Perkins Award for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an Award for Experimental Writing (Indiana University). He has also won an award from Western Illinois University for his play, Ti Amo Lucia Olivetti and has completed a trilogy of new one-act plays titled: Taxing Tales, that includes: Van Gogh's Audit, Superman in America and Bruno Arlt at the Grille Café as well as the play, A Colloquy of Birds all of which are being considered for production with the Arena Theatre, Washington, D.C. He has translated three works: Xavier de Maistre's novella, Un voyage autour de ma chambre, Balzac's play, Mercadet, and Baudelaire's novella, La Fanfarlo. He is currently at work on a book of memoirs titled, Posthumous Papers of a Living Writer which includes reminiscences on people from Beckett to Borges, Letterman to August Wilson. His critical books include, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortázar (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1990); The Poetics of Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1999). His latest novels include, Aleatory; or, A Day in the Life of Jürgen Jürgensen, Imaginary Cartographer A Novel in Four Cities and The Checks and Balances of Alfie Schiller, and the short story collection, Kissing Sonia Braga and Other Tales all completed in 2010. He is currently at work on four new novels, Proost's Grocery: A Novel in 14 Aisles; The Sorrows of Seymour Schreibman; Bitters & the Professor; or, A Semester in the Life of Malcolm Malarkey PhD; and Dangerous Liaisons: The Email Edition. His complete works of writing run to over 100 volumes.
From 2005-2007 he was a judge on the Fulbright Commissions Panel for Creative Writing from 2005-2007. In spring, 2002, he was honored as a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA and was a featured speaker at the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series at San Diego State University in October, 2003. In 2005, he was a guest professor of Creative Writing-Fiction at Pomona College, Claremont, CA and was invited to return in spring, 2006. In June 2005, he was invited to teach at the 65th Annual Indiana University Writers Conference in Bloomington. In November, 2008, he was invited by the Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires, to participate in the 1st Annual FILBA International Literary Festival there where he read from his fiction and sat on a panel devoted to creative writing. He is currently working on a literary anthology devoted to world hunger with contributions from such writers as J.M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Doris Lessing, Luisa Valenzuela, Ariel Dorfman, Martin Amis, and JP Donleavy just to mention a few. He is a regular political blogger for the HuffingtonPost.com and his non-fiction and reviews have appeared in such periodicals and magazines as the Times Literary Supplement, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the American Book Review, OC Weekly, Irish America, MSP Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Playboy and others.
A corresponding member of the international film organization, CILECT, he is a practicing screenwriter and has won awards for his writing from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute. He has written over twenty screenplays and teleplays and his adaptation and co-production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "An Author's Mother" won awards from the Scottish Association of Filmmakers, the London International Film & Video Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Video do Algarve, Portugal. He has taught or conducted screenwriting seminars and workshops throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United Kingdom as well as the United States including stints at: the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba [the school founded by García Márquez]; the Goethe Institute, Santiago, Chile (with Antonio Skármeta [author of Il Postino]); with both SICA, the Cinematographer's Union of Argentina, and Proyectos Culturales in Buenos Aires; at the National Film School of Denmark, Copenhagen; the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland; the Grimme Akadamie, Cologne; the Flemish Film Academy, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium; PILOTS, Barcelona, Spain; Edinburgh University, Scotland; the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires; the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; Columbia College, Chicago; Independent Features North, Minneapolis; Western Washington University, Bellingham; Elmira College, Elmira, NY; Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Paris Writers Workshop, Paris. For four years, he was a regular visiting adjunct professor of screenwriting at the Hamburg Media School, Hamburg, Germany.
In May, 2006, he was invited by the United States Embassy, Berlin to speak on screenwriting and to conduct screenwriting lectures at a number of German universities in Munich, Berlin, Leipzig and Cologne among other places. Since 2006, he has been invited annually to lecture at UNIACC in Santiago, Chile and PEN International asked him to be the lead judge for the 2006 Best Original Screenplay Award. In addition, he has been invited to conduct screenwriting lectures the John Huston School of Film and Digital Media, Galway, Ireland as well as at the Baltic Film School, Tallinn University, Estonia; UIAH, Helsinki, Finland; FAMU, Prague; and Black Coffee Films, Mumbai, India. In August, 2008 he was invited to teach at ARCOS Film School in Santiago, Chile at the invitation of the United States Embassy, Santiago and also gave film lectures in Buenos Aires at the invitation of the United States Embassy, Buenos Aires. In September, 2008 he was invited by UNIACC Film School, Santiago, to participate in a major Latin American screenwriting conference sponsored by IBERMEDIA. Most recent, he was invited to be a screenwriting mentor at Hatchfest 2010 in Bozeman, Montana where he also lectured at Montana State University.
His film books include: Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001); Character & Conflict: Cornerstones of Screenwriting (Heinemann, 2004); I Read It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation (Heinemann, 2006) and Look Who's Talking & Why: Dialogue which will be published by Continuum. His latest scripts include an adaptation of the Yasujiro Ozu film, Tokyo Story. In December, 2009 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach screenwriting at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in August, 2010 & in August, 2011.