To honor Caleb Carr’s birthday today, I am pleased to release the third post in our series commemorating the 30th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication. Having discussed the novel’s origins in Part One and its critical reception in Part Two, in this installment we return to Caleb’s first love — the screen — and a major source of buzz in the lead up to The Alienist’s publication: the promise of a movie adaptation. “You won’t find many writers who love movies as much as I do,” Caleb explained in an interview from 1997. “Movies formed much of the imagery that I use in my books.”
Thanks to a generous visitor to the website, in today’s post we glimpse a rare leather-bound copy of one of the first scripts developed for the book and learn about the challenges it faced making the leap to the screen.
Taking the story from page to screen
As described in Part One, The Alienist was the talk of Hollywood even before its publication. Soon after the manuscript was turned in to Random House in 1993, interest in purchasing the film rights was high, with names like Mike Nichols and Kathleen Kennedy looking at the project; however, it was Scott Rudin who made the winning bid of $500,000. Unfortunately, the excitement that followed was short lived. Caleb revealed in a 2013 New York Times book club chat that he ultimately came to wish he hadn’t listened to his agents’ advice on proceeding with the sale:
“What originally happened was that Mike Nichols had wanted to buy the book; but he was outbid, for reasons of professional competitiveness, by producer Scott Rudin, and how I wish I hadn’t listened to my agents. Rudin promised me I could write the script, then immediately reneged on that pledge and told me that there was “no movie in the Alienist.” He spent many years and millions of dollars on writers and directors who turned in one lousy script after another, which I was fortunate enough to be able to stop, incurring Rudin’s well-known wrath. He has now repeatedly said that there will never be a film of the movie, and although that decision is the studio’s, not his, he spent so much money on development that no one can afford the turnaround.”
The saga of the scripts
The script problems Caleb referenced go back to the very beginning. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times from 1995, the first of the scripts to be rejected was written by Tony-award winning playwright David Henry Hwang, who turned in a draft that “diverged too radically from the novel, focusing on a minor female character.” A second script, this time written by Steven Katz (Shadow of the Vampire, The Knick, and uncredited for work on Interview with the Vampire), was “considered too slavish to the original source material.” Even so, it appears this was a version Rudin had hopes for.
To entice studio executives into paying attention to the project, it was revealed in July of 1995 that Rudin made the unusual decision to arrange for copies of the script to bound in a special leather volume. Illustrated with period photographs and artwork of late 19th century New York, these copies were truly beautiful, as you can see below.
