THE STUNT MAN is an excellent example of how to adapt a novel filled with interior monologue to the screen while preserving what is important about the novel. Unfortunately--and this is not the film's fault, or the director/scriptwriter's fault, or the actors' fault--the film was so far outside the Hollywood norm that it nearly sank without a trace.
* This film is theme-driven, not character-driven or plot-driven. That means that one must watch it with one's brain fully engaged; it's not a light "entertainment" like a Grisham novel, but a meatier piece like a Graham Greene novel. This is so far outside the Hollywood experience--that is, that some people are entertained by being challenged--that there's little wonder that the studio consolidation of the 1970s nearly extinguished the film.
* This film is also one of those extremely rare instances in which the sheer writing is substantially superior to the literary work from which it was adapted. Brodeur was a beginning writer at the time, and it shows. Richard Rush may have had a background in "exploitation" films, but somehow or another he worked a sense of Kafka into THE STUNT MAN without being pretentious about it... in a way that the novel never achieves.
If THE STUNT MAN was to be released today, one would expect it to be from one of the "boutique imprints"; Fox Searchlight, not Fox, or Sony Classics, not TriStar. One would also expect that it had been done on a relatively small budget, with the actors taking pay cuts to participate.
* This film is theme-driven, not character-driven or plot-driven. That means that one must watch it with one's brain fully engaged; it's not a light "entertainment" like a Grisham novel, but a meatier piece like a Graham Greene novel. This is so far outside the Hollywood experience--that is, that some people are entertained by being challenged--that there's little wonder that the studio consolidation of the 1970s nearly extinguished the film.
* This film is also one of those extremely rare instances in which the sheer writing is substantially superior to the literary work from which it was adapted. Brodeur was a beginning writer at the time, and it shows. Richard Rush may have had a background in "exploitation" films, but somehow or another he worked a sense of Kafka into THE STUNT MAN without being pretentious about it... in a way that the novel never achieves.
If THE STUNT MAN was to be released today, one would expect it to be from one of the "boutique imprints"; Fox Searchlight, not Fox, or Sony Classics, not TriStar. One would also expect that it had been done on a relatively small budget, with the actors taking pay cuts to participate.