Sundance, the glitzy winter marketplace for independent movies, opens today in Park City, Utah, and one filmmaker who will be front and center is Rawson Marshall Thurber ’97.
Thurber, who wrote and directed the 2004 hit comedy, “Dodgeball,” is getting considerable buzz for his new movie, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.” The film, based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, stars Jon Foster, Siena Miller, Nick Nolte, Peter Sarsgaard and Mena Suvari.
It chronicles the post-college exploits of Foster’s Art Bechstein, the son of a gangster, played by Nolte. Saarsgard is a drug-addled thief named Cleveland, and Miller plays his girlfriend, Jane. Suvari is Foster’s sometime girlfriend, a beautiful librarian named Phlox.
“Some people might be intrigued by the idea that the guy who did ‘Dodgeball’ is doing this film,” Thurber told Hollywood Reporter this week. ‘But I don’t think it’s necessarily that there are indie directors or studio directors anymore but that there’s subject and subject matter, and some are aligned to indies and some to studios.”
Thurber fell in love with Chabon’s novel when he read it in 1995: “I kind of knew I wanted to make the movie of the book pretty much before I knew I wanted to make movies,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"There’s a sense of beauty to the novel, a sense of fun, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia at play, of memory, and it’s a great summertime novel in the same way that “The Great Gatsby’ was a great summertime novel,” he said. “So I think it’s a classic American story, it’s a coming-of-age story, it’s the story about that last true summer of your life.”
On Wednesday, the film was named one of “10 Movies to Check Out at Sundance” by USA Today.
One of the producers of Thurber’s latest project is another Union graduate, Thor Benander ’95. And while in the Beehive State, if Thurber wants to reminisce about his alma mater, he can chat up Jackson’s Garden and the Nott Memorial with Sundance chief Robert Redford. The iconic actor/director spent several weeks on campus back in the fall and winter of 1972-73 filming scenes for “The Way We Were,” co-starring Barbra Streisand.
Thurber holds bachelor's degrees in English and Theater Arts from Union and an MFA in producing from the University of Southern California. He credits his liberal arts background at Union with giving him a good foundation for his Hollywood career.
His next planned big-screen project is an adaptation of the hit television series, “Magnum PI.”
And while Union’s at the movies, “The Bucket List,” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, debuted at number one last weekend. What’s the connection? Director Rob Reiner, in a recent New York Times interview, said he tried to get the film made for several years, but had no luck until Alan Horn ’64, the president of Warner Bros. Entertainment, finally gave the project the go-ahead. Horn, Reiner and others co-founded Castle Rock Entertainment in 1987.
Thurber and Horn both live in California.