Four Torches (Out of Five)

If Maurice Sendak didn’t really exist, some writer would’ve had to invent him.

Sendak, who is openly gay, had a miserable childhood, still hates his parents, never wanted children himself, and is obsessed with death.

He’s also the writer and illustrator of perhaps the world’s most famous (and also possibly the best) picture book, 1964’s Where the Wild Things Are, as well as a number of critically acclaimed (and sometimes very controversial) books for children.

He’s also now the subject of a short new HBO documentary, Tell Them Anything You Want, directed by Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze (Jonze is the director of a highly anticipated upcoming film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, coming later this week).

Tell Them Anything You Want is a modest film. It seems to be just Bangs and Jonze with a hand-held video camera in Sendak’s house, asking him questions about his life and his career.

It’s also pretty damn fascinating.

Be forewarned: Sendak is a very dark man who has lived a very sad life. At first, it’s hard to know what to make of this bitter, sometimes unbalanced old man. But the more he talks, the more you realize how perfectly equipped he was to revolutionize the field of children’s literature.

According to Sendak, Wild Things, with its less-than-perfect mother and negative emotions, initially got terrible reviews and was frequently banned. And even Sendak admits, he wasn’t the “best” artist.

But kids absolutely loved the book — so much so that adults could not deny its incredible power. The secret, Sendak says, is that he was willing to say things that other children’s authors would not: he was willing to tell children the truth.

“I don’t believe in childhood,” he says at one point when discussing his belief that there are no subjects that should be “off-limits” to children, but also clearly speaking of his own early loss of innocence. “Tell [children] anything you want, as long as it’s true.”

This HBO documentary is a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man.

Here’s a prediction: the upcoming feature film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, to be released on October 16th, will be stunning artistic triumph or a critical disaster.

If it’s the former, it might even be a box office hit. If it’s the latter, it will surely end up a massive flop.

How is such an “either-or” prediction possible?

It has a lot to do with the unconventional director, Spike Jonze, who has broken the “rules” of filmmaking on both his previous films and who sees Wild Things as his most personal ever — despite its $80 million-plus studio-level budget.

But it also has to do with the troubled history of the film — turmoil that’s been spilling out onto the blogs for years now and is now featured in a splashy cover story on last Sunday’s issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Jonze is the director of only two previous films: Being John Malkovich and Adaptation — both critically acclaimed, but also impossible to pigeon-hole. (Indeed, Adaptation is a satire of the whole by-the-numbers filmmaking process — and an homage to those who try to circumvent it.)

From the start, the word on Where the Wild Things Are has been that it’s different — really different.

According to the New York Times, Universal Studios passed on the film, claiming that Jonze’s script, co-written with author Dave Eggers, didn’t have enough of a plot (much like the book). It was Warner Brothers that finally greenlit it, based on earlier successes fitting quirky indie directors like Christopher Nolan and Alfonso Cuaron into big-budget hits like Batman Begins and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

But Jonze battled the studio throughout the production, insisting, for example, that it’s okay that the film is thematically ambiguous and that what little dialogue there is be “realistic” and not always capable of being understood by the audience.

According to 2007 blog reports, an early screening of the film’s rough cut resulted in crying children and walk-outs.

The studio insisted on changes, but Jonze reportedly refused most of them. After all, the director went through similar disagreements with the financiers of Being John Malkovich, and he ended up being hailed as visionary.

With many millions of dollars at stake, the studio is now at least pretending to play nice.

“It’s like the studio was expecting a boy, and I gave birth to a girl,” Jonze told the New York Times. “And now they’re learning to love and accept their daughter.”

With the impending release of the film, it’s tempting to simply assume that Where the Wild Things Are is yet another case of a brilliant filmmaker being forced into mediocrity by a craven, soul-less movie studio — another Brazil, for example. The studio agreed to release Terry Gilliam’s cut of that film only after the Los Angeles Film Critics Association shamed them into it; the critics awarded Gilliam’s version Best Picture after a private screening by the director.

Still, for every success like Brazil, there are plenty of “director’s cuts” that are pretty much unwatchable disasters — films like Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain or Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. (And for the record, Brazil still flopped, at least in the U.S.)

In other words, the studios aren’t always wrong, at least when it comes to wide appeal. After all, “wide appeal” is how they make their money.

There are even those (like this writer) who think that Jonze’s earlier films had major flaws and were critically acclaimed mostly because their concepts were so outrageous and bold — so decidedly different than anything else Hollywood was producing.

Still, no matter how slight the plot of Where the Wild Things Are is, the story of its adaptation as a movie will have a very definite ending: on October 16th, when the film is released.

It remains to be seen, however, if that ending will be a happy one for Jonze and the studio.

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