Screenwriter for Popeye the Sailor
11-5-77
Imagine a movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Popeye the Sailor and Lily
Tomlin as his girlfriend Olive Oyl.
Anyone who has seen the old Popeye cartoons, or the new computer animated1 ones, might think that the fighting mariner2 does not have the dramatic qualities needed for a full-length film. But according to Westsider Jules Feiffer, who is now writing the script for Popeye the Sailor, the original comic strip in the daily newspapers was the work of "an unrecognized genius." E.C. Segar created Popeye and drew him from 1924 to 1938. After that the character changed. Feiffer finds the original strip to be his biggest source of inspiration.
"The cartoons," says Feiffer, sitting on one arm of a chair in his Riverside Drive apartment, "exploit the violence between Popeye and Bluto. That was never part of the strip. It's more along the lines of the traditional cartoon of the 1940s, which could find nothing more interesting than one character dismembering another. I didn't find that funny when I was a kid and I don't now."
Feiffer developed his unique style of humor long before he sold his first cartoon. Today, though still perhaps best known as a cartoonist, he has gained a reputation as a playwright3 for both the stage (Knock, Knock and Little Murders) and the screen (Carnal Knowledge). He is also a respected prose writer, having recently published his second novel, Ackroyd.
A product of the Bronx, Feiffer recalls that after graduating from high school he went through "a series of schlock jobs to buy food and drawing materials. And long periods of unemployment." He planned all along to become a cartoonist. "I was prepared," he says, "for the eventual4 success which I was certain was going to happen if my work remained true to myself."
Feiffer spent several years as an assistant to other cartoonists and attended two art schools. Still, no one would publish his work until a day in 1956 when Feiffer, age 27, took a batch5 of his best 'toons to the office of a new, relatively6 unknown weekly called The Village Voice. They loved his work, and he became a regular contributor.
"All other publications at that time had their own idea of their readership. And editors insisted on tailoring stories to their own taste. The Voice," says Feiffer, "existed for the artist's taste and the writer's taste. It was a time when McCarthyism and the blacklist were rampant7 through every strata8 of society."
The Voice was then the only publication of its kind. It wrote about dissent9; it was considered revolutionary, and Feiffer's weekly cartoons helped it to maintain that image.
Success came quickly to Feiffer after he joined the Village Voice: "It happened faster than I thought. It was only about three months or so before my work came to be talked about, and publishers began to offer book contracts." Syndication took place a few years later. Now the cartoon is carried by somewhat over 100 publications in every country of the western world and several in the Far East.
Feiffer's cartoon takes him one day a week to conceive and draw. During the other six days he works on his latest writing project. For three years — until it was published this past summer — that project was Ackroyd, an unconventional detective-type novel in which the characters are too human to keep their traditional roles as props10 for the detective's cleverness. The book is less suspenseful11 than a standard detective novel, but more revealing of human nature.
One of the things that has been in my work for many years," says Feiffer, "is people's need to communicate with each other not directly, but in code. … Coded language is used to guide our lives, to frame our relationships with people." Feiffer's main character takes the name Roger Ackroyd and tries to become a private detective. Instead he gets "so intertwined with the coded life of his clients that he works on that for the rest of his career."
Ackroyd got extremely mixed reviews. "It's what I'm used to," notes the author. "Some reviews have been glowing. Others wondered what the hell the book was about and why I bothered to write it." Feiffer takes the good and the bad in stride, remembering what happened when his first play, Little Murders, opened on Broadway in 1967.
"It got all negative reviews and closed in a week," he recalls. "It was immediately done in London after that, which started the revival12, because it was done very successfully. Then it was brought back to New York the following year and it won all the awards." In 1971 it was made into a successful film starring Elliott Gould and Marcia Rodd.
An occasional theatregoer, Feiffer ends the interview on a customary depressing note, saying that he is generally disappointed by even the biggest hits in town.
"I don't think of myself as a Broadway playwright," he says. "I'd be ashamed of that title. I don't think the Broadway theatre is very interesting or has been for the last 20 years."
点击收听单词发音
1 animated | |
adj.生气勃勃的,活跃的,愉快的 | |
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2 mariner | |
n.水手号不载人航天探测器,海员,航海者 | |
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3 playwright | |
n.剧作家,编写剧本的人 | |
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4 eventual | |
adj.最后的,结局的,最终的 | |
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5 batch | |
n.一批(组,群);一批生产量 | |
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6 relatively | |
adv.比较...地,相对地 | |
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7 rampant | |
adj.(植物)蔓生的;狂暴的,无约束的 | |
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8 strata | |
n.地层(复数);社会阶层 | |
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9 dissent | |
n./v.不同意,持异议 | |
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10 props | |
小道具; 支柱( prop的名词复数 ); 支持者; 道具; (橄榄球中的)支柱前锋 | |
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11 suspenseful | |
adj.悬疑的,令人紧张的 | |
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12 revival | |
n.复兴,复苏,(精力、活力等的)重振 | |
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