“Bright Lights” in Schwartz’s Future

Michael J. Fox, surely wondering why the first “Bright Lights Big City” movie didn’t work.

Variety reports that Josh Schwartz will make his directorial debut with a new adaptation of Jay McInerney’s novel “Bright Lights, Big City.” Schwartz is also writing the screenplay.

Schwartz is best known for his TV work with shows such as “The O.C.” and “Gossip Girl.” He’s edging into the big screen business by writing the script for “X-Men: First Class,” then will begin work on “Bright Lights.”

McInerney’s book is an ’80s classic, often mentioned along with Bret Easton Ellis’s “Less Than Zero.” It’s about a young, struggling magazine writer who gets lost in drugs and alcohol while trying to keep up in the fast lane in 1980s Manhattan. The 1988 film version starred Michael J. Fox, Phoebe Cates, and Kiefer Sutherland. It wasn’t very good (and btw, opinion on the book is pretty divided, outside of its value as an ’80s time capsule), so a remake is certainly a reasonable idea.

The hardest part about adapting the book is that it is actually narrated in second person, literary rarity (and a rather show-offy trick, imho). For those of you who forgot about point-of-view lessons from your fifth grade English class, this means that it is written, “You enter the restaurant and look around…” “You rush to the corner and stop to catch your breath…” and so on. This can get a little claustrophobic, but it also works in conveying the lost, detached nature of the narrator. The problem, though, is while it works on the page, it can be just flat and dead onscreen (or on voiceover). I haven’t seen the movie in a while and it didn’t make a big enough impression on me to remember all the details, but I think it used some voiceover with the second person feel, but then treated the rest as a conventional movie. It wasn’t godawful, but if you see it, you won’t feel alone in thinking, “Wow, so this book was a really big deal? I wonder why…”

So why not take another crack at it? Schwartz says he isn’t sure yet if he’s going to keep the book in the 1980s or move it. He’s apparently gotten to know McInerney, even getting him to write some ”Gossip Girl” episodes, so presumably any major change, like switching the time period, would be okayed by him first. If I was betting, I’d put my money on Schwartz moving it to say, 2007 or something like that.