About the Production
American Splendor immerses you in the life and worldview of Harvey Pekar, working-class Everyman, first-class curmudgeon, and unlikely family man. It’s a pretty ordinary life: a dead-end job as a file clerk at a local VA hospital; an apartment in the same Rust Belt city, Cleveland, where he was born and raised; two busted marriages; and various hobbies and interests that help pass the time.
But Harvey’s take on that life, and how he deals with it, is anything but average. Innately pessimistic and hilariously expressive, Harvey opines, complains, confronts, and on those occasions when he sees or experiences something fine, appreciates. His humanity and curiosity are as intrinsic to his personality as his acerbic humor.
First published in 1976, Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor” originated the autobiographical comic genre. A comic book about nothing more, and nothing less, than the everyday moments that comprise one man’s
life, “American Splendor” is one of the most acclaimed comic books ever. It has influenced many leading contemporary comic book artists, including Gilbert Hernandez (“Love & Rockets”) and Joe Sacco (“Palestine”), who freely acknowledge their debt to Pekar’s naturalistic model. The series has also been
recognized in general literary circles, and in 1987 “American Splendor” earned Pekar an American Book Award. In addition to his comic books, Pekar has written extensively about music and literature, frequently championing forgotten or overlooked artists. Meanwhile, he worked full-time at the Cleveland VA Hospital, from 1966 until his retirement in 2001.
An issue of “American Splendor” will typically contain scenes from Pekar’s life: a search for a lost set of keys, say, or a conversation with his wife Joyce about his substandard dishwashing skills. And there’s more. There are vignettes about people Pekar has known in his life; street scenes he happened to witness; monologues about social, political and philosophical issues. Because he is not a cartoonist, Pekar has sought collaborators to illustrate his stories. Over the years, these illustrators have included such prominent artists as R. Crumb, Drew Friedman and Jim Woodring.
Pekar’s fans may not be legion, but they are passionate. One of them is producer Ted Hope, whose credits include such groundbreaking independent films as Happiness, The Brothers McMullen, The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm and In The Bedroom, along with recent films Lovely & Amazing and The Laramie Project. Hope discovered Pekar’s work as a teenager, when he frequented the underground section of comic book stores. One day he picked up an issue of “American Splendor” that featured illustrations by the great R. Crumb – and found a comic that was altogether different from any other he’d ever read. Recalls Hope, “It was immediately unique because it was an autobiography. And it was about the most mundane elements of life, and trying to find beauty and transcendence in the everyday.” Hope joined the loyal readership that devoured each new issue of “American Splendor” as it appeared on an approximately annual basis.
As far back as 1980, various attempts had been made to bring “American Splendor” to the screen. Hope had been approached about some of these projects, but never felt they captured the spirit of Pekar’s work.
In 1998, the rights to “American Splendor” became available once again. Thanks to cartoonist/animator Dean Haspiel, who had worked with both Pekar and Hope, the necessary connection was forged. A deal soon followed. But the right screenplay proved elusive. Hope found that the lifelike randomness that made “American Splendor” so special also made it a problematic prospect for adaptation. “There’s no real dramatic arc; it’s essentially small moments. What works as a six-panel, one- or two-page comic in two dimensions can’t sustain a whole movie.” A solution of sorts presented itself when Hope went to Cleveland to visit Pekar, his wife and collaborator Joyce Brabner, and their foster daughter Danielle Batone. “It became clear that you couldn’t make a movie about Harvey without him being in it – he is such a dynamic personality and so unique an individual, that he had to be part of it. The other thing that became clear was that it wasn’t just Harvey’s story; it was the story of him, Joyce and Danielle.”
Hope approached the filmmaking team of Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, known for their offbeat, perceptive documentaries Off The Menu: The Last Days Of Chasen’s and The Young And The Dead. Berman & Pulcini had also written two much-admired screenplays about unusual real-life individuals, the Mexican composer and bandleader Esquivel and flamboyant Hollywood restaurateur Prince Michael Romanoff. And, like Pekar and Brabner, they were husband-and-wife collaborators. To Hope, the filmmakers seemed a perfect fit for a film about the life and work of Harvey Pekar, comic book realist.
He sent them some issues of “American Splendor.” As documentarians, Berman & Pulcini were impressed by the comic’s realistic representation of a working
class life, an area they’d explored in their films. Moreover, those stories were filtered through Pekar’s acute, hilarious, and relentlessly candid sensibility. Comments Robert Pulcini, “There aren’t many great examples of an intensely real interior voice, where somebody’s documenting their life honestly. Harvey
definitely does that. It’s so warts-and-all, and he’s so eager to express all of the negative aspects of his personality. He wears all his emotions on his sleeve; sometimes he’s horrible and sometimes he’s sentimental. I just loved that aspect of his character.”
Then there was the irresistible pull of Pekar himself – unpolished, unpretentious, and defiantly unscripted – as captured in a videotape of his appearances on David Letterman’s NBC television program. “That really cinched the deal for us,” Shari Berman reports of the Letterman footage. “We actually got to see Harvey
Pekar, not just read about him in the comic book. We realized that he was an incredibly compelling individual, and we got hooked.” Berman & Pulcini thoroughly familiarized themselves with Pekar and his work before starting the screenplay.
They read and re-read 25 years of Pekar’s work and, after establishing a fluent phone relationship, the filmmakers spent a weekend with Pekar and Brabner in Cleveland. For their parts, Pekar and Brabner felt the filmmakers brought a specific and important understanding of the material. Comments Brabner,
“We felt that we’d do really well with a husband-and-wife team, because this isn’t really just a story about this lone guy. It’s a story about marriage and becoming a family.”
Returning to New York, Berman & Pulcini got to work on the screenplay. As they assembled their favorite vignettes from the comics, they began to hone in on a narrative framework. Explains Berman, “The thing we found as our guiding principle was the love story between a man and his art form, which was, in
Harveys case, comic books. It’s about a man who found a life through comic books. He found a creative voice; he found some kind of fame; he found a purpose and a legacy, which was very important to him; he found a wife; he ended up finding a daughter and making a family; and he wound up beating a disease – all through comic books.”
At the same time, Pekar and his comic books gave people something real and resonant, not to mention funny and entertaining. Pekar’s stories dealt with the simple things that cause most of us vexation, consternation or pleasure. His perspective spoke to anyone who ever felt like an outsider, or just plain
stuck, says Pulcini. “To me, Harvey is kind of the patron saint of every creative person who’s been trapped in a dead-end job, but still finds a way to express themselves.”
American Splendor, the film, is as inventive and unbound as its subject. A formal hybrid, it combines adaptation, biopic, animation, and documentary elements. In integrating documentary footage and interviews, the film not only gives a glimpse of the real Harvey Pekar, it invokes the interest in typical day-to-day stuff that is so much a part of his work.
“We really saw this as an adaptation of the comic books,” remarks Pulcini. “Harvey hates rules, and I think that comes through in his work. We tried to find a vehicle that was as rebellious as the way Harvey puts his comics together.”
The filmmakers also felt their creative role paralleled that of the cartoonists who illustrate Pekar’s stories in “American Splendor.” Notes Berman, “Different artists draw different Harvey’s. That’s why we felt like we could have an actor as narrative Harvey; Harvey Pekar in a documentary format as the real Harvey; and then animated Harvey. It wasn’t random; we owed it to ‘American Splendor’ to work like that.”
The fact that Pekar himself would be in the film had to be considered in the casting process. Comments Pulcini, “It wasn’t so much that we wanted someone who looked like Harvey, but we wanted there to be a very easy transition between the person playing Harvey and the real Harvey, in terms of the energy and the posture. Also, Harvey has a strange magnetism that causes your eye to go to him, and the actor playing him had to have that, too. These were all things that Paul Giamatti brought when he auditioned so naturally for the role. Paul rose above any kind of imitation and he captured Harvey’s worldview, which is present even in his body language.”
The role presented Giamatti with an intriguing combination of character and real life individual. “I play basically the comic book version of Harvey – the persona that he’s created and put into the comic books,” the actor comments. “Harvey’s an interesting person, unbelievably smart and pretty much self-educated.
He’s read everything. He’s really into American naturalists, and I think his work has that same kind of quality; exposing life in an almost clinical way. It’s very poetic, too.”
Hope Davis portrays Pekar’s wife and collaborator, comic book artist Joyce Brabner. Berman recalls that she and Pulcini saw many actresses for the role, and were having trouble making up their minds – until Davis came in. “A lot of people read the role as a New York neurotic, and Hope understood it to be much different. She wasn’t trying to go for the laughs. And although a lot of what she does in the film is very funny, she got Joyce on a deeper level.” Remarks Davis, “Joyce is probably the most colorful character I’ve ever played. She’s extremely
intellectual, a very opinionated and forthright person. She and Harvey are fascinating characters, and they’re also hilariously drawn in the script.”
Rounding out the primary cast are James Urbaniak as Robert Crumb, Pekar’s longtime friend and the man who inspired him to write comics, and Judah Friedlander as Toby Radloff, Pekar’s VA co-worker. The film’s real-life counterparts often came by the set. Recalls Berman, “There were a couple of times when I’d turn around and there would be Paul Giamatti sitting next to Harvey and Toby Radloff sitting next to Judah Friedlander and Hope Davis sitting next to Joyce Brabner. It was like all these doppelgangers hanging
around. For us, it was one of the weirdest things you could ever see.”
Says Joyce Brabner, “Paul and Hope do tremendous jobs portraying us as characters.” She recalls one the first visits she and Pekar made to the set, when they watched Giamatti film a scene set in a coffee shop. “We were doing double-takes,” Brabner laughs. “We just kept looking around going, ‘What is Harvey doing over there?!’ Paul had the voice and everything else.”
American Splendor shot for five weeks in November-December 2001 in Pekar’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. In developing a cinematic counterpart to the comic book’s visual naturalism, the filmmakers looked for inspiration to 1970s films like Fat City, The French Connection, and The Deer Hunter. With the
acclaimed cinematographer Terry Stacey (Wendigo, Things Behind The Sun), Berman & Pulcini worked up an earth-toned palette of rusts, browns, and faded blues and greens for the narrative portions of the film. Berman notes that Stacey also came up with different ways to incorporate visual motifs from the comic
book into the film. “Terry would look at the comic frames and panels and get really inspired by specific elements. For example, one of the artists always draws people in silhouette and Terry came up with great ideas about how we could have a scene where someone’s in silhouette.”
Berman & Pulcini shot the documentary sections of the film on a Cleveland soundstage. “We didn’t want the documentary portions to compete with gritty, realistic look of the narrative,” Pulcini explains. “We came up with this concept of creating these overtly artificial environments for the documentary sections –
almost one-dimensional, with a few things placed properly in the frame. Harvey does that in some of his comic book frames; he picks and chooses certain things to include that are important.”
The animation, titles and special effects were handled by Gary Leib and John Kuramoto of the New York City company Twinkle. Leib and Kuramoto were both longtime fans of Pekar’s work and knew “American Splendor” well. In fact, the pair recreated the comic book’s illustrative tone so well that the filmmakers decided to add more animated touches to the film. Says Berman, “Gary and John really challenged themselves to do something special. And they came up with original ideas about how to weave the animation into the movie in a way that’s totally organic, and not just placed upon the movie.”
Meticulous attention was also paid to the film’s score and soundtrack, a necessity given Pekar’s reputation as a jazz critic and record collector. Pekar made a couple of specific requests, too. One was for a piece by jazz musician Joe Maneri, whom Pekar championed in his 90s music criticism. The other was Marvin
Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar.” “It’s one of my favorite R&B tunes,” Pekar affirms. “It’s a beautiful arrangement, Gaye does a beautiful job, it’s a fine composition and everything clicks, as far as I’m concerned. People have been trying to make movies of my work going back to 1980, and I always heard ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ in the soundtrack.”
The song became centerpiece of the film. Says Pulcini, “It’s such a wonderful phrase to sum up what Harvey does. It’s like, yeah, Harvey finds a lot of things peculiar and he represents them. And we thought the song would be a really wonderful moment of release for when he finds his creative voice.” Ultimately, it is Harvey Pekar’s voice that is the soul of American Splendor. “Harvey made us promise one thing, which was that we wouldn’t tie everything up in a neat little package and make some Hollywood happy ending,” recalls Berman. “He wanted us to be honest. He said, ‘I don’t want to be glamorized, I don’t want to be made into someone I’m not.’ And so we end with his voiceover again saying, ‘Yeah,
I got this movie made. But Joyce and I still fight like crazy, I worry about money, the kid’s got ADD.’ He’s still complaining.”
Danielle Batone, Pekar and Brabner’s foster daughter, gives American Splendor a thumbs-up. “I really liked it,” says Batone, who is now 15. “Real life is more complicated, but it’s pretty good for a film.”
American Splendor made its premiere at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. Pekar was characteristically honest when he spoke to his hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on January 26th, the day after the awards ceremony. “I’m real happy,” he allowed. “I don’t know
about awards … how much can they mean? But I’m happy for the people who made it. They’re very, very nice, they’re bright, they’re talented. If I had contact with people like that every day, I wouldn’t be depressed and everything.”
With American Splendor completed, Ted Hope looks forward to introducing Harvey Pekar and his work to a wider audience. “The comics really were a big part of my life; they resonated so deeply with me,” he says warmly. “But really, the best I could do was pass them on to good friends, knowing the comics were something other people didn’t have much access to, if they even knew ‘American Splendor’ existed. That was one of the reasons I wanted to make the film: to introduce Harvey Pekar to all the people that don’t know about him. Because here is a great poet, a great personality, another approach to life that isn’t normally celebrated.”
Hope continues, “Harvey’s also somebody who represents a real level of integrity. He never wanted to truly participate in mainstream culture; either by choice or force of personality, he often did not do that which might have helped him. He’s portrayed himself – and everyone in his life – with tremendous humanity and honesty. There’s no attempt to cover anything up, and no shame in saying who you are. I think that’s very inspiring.”
