Introduction and Novels AMC Should Adapt Part 1: William Gaddis' JR

Introduction to the concept

If you've read any broadsheet paper over the last, oh, I'd say three-to-ten years, you will be aware of a particular cultural obsession - the rise of the television series box set.

From HBO's pioneering crime serials Oz, The Wire and The Sopranos through the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the spread of such mature, experimental programming throughout the schedules of effectively every broadcaster in the US (AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad; Cinemax's The Knick; Showtime's Dexter, etc.) - if one is looking for an engaging 50 + hours of television, one does not have to look far.

It has been noted that the prolonged dramatic development (and the associated emotional attachment one, almost unconsciously, gives) inherent to the art form, is akin only to the novel.
One works when one reads - as such, pushing through a thick novel, shoving your way through Dante or Beckett takes dozens of hours.
When you read, you re-read, you imagine and you criticise and you argue.
We do the same with our beloved television shows.

As I've been at pains to posit - they're vaguely similar, alright...

With the rise of the 'serious' TV show, we have reached an age where those great beasts of literature can possibly - finally - be tackled with success.
No more must we settle with abridged cinematic adaptations, we will hopefully see those great works attacked, as Fassbinder did with his 14-part take on Berlin Alexanderplatz (an early masterpiece of the 'box set' genre).

What I intend to do here, is suggest works of literature on a regular basis that could be adapted for the box - I want to put forward novels that have been labelled as, unfilmable.
After all, due to the formal constraints of cinema, texts of a certain length (and depth) just can't be translated into that medium - remember the Watchmen film? Yeah, neither do I...


William Gaddis's 1975 novel - JR

It is difficult to know where one starts with JR. This is a 726 page novel told almost entirely in dialogue, with brief elliptical interludes in the present-continuous. It sounds pretty tough doesn't it?
 
Well, it is. But this should be no reason for one to avoid the book - it's hilarious, it's sexy and - most importantly with regards to our focus - it has plot. The novel is all voice and plot, and the emphasis on these functions makes the book one that is very amenable to the modern television drama series.

So, plot... JR is, centrally, about an eleven year-old boy (the eponymous JR Vansant) who manages to create a corporate empire built on penny stocks via the telephone at his high school. Along the way, the reader will encounter Jack Gibbs (a free-spirited, somewhat nihilistic physics teacher), Edward Bast (failed composer and consistent failure to all of the women in his life) and Mrs Joubert (not just a beautiful school teacher, but the daughter of a recently retired powerful stockbroker), as well as dozens of others. An entire cast-list can be found here.

Why would JR work as a Breaking Bad styled 50-minute-an-episode television show?

Well, we're back to William Gaddis' crucial aesthetic play - the prevalance of dialogue (at least 90% of the text), and those hallucinatory, floaty elliptical interludes.

Portraying dozens of different voices without those signposts writers are so fond of (- 'so and so said'), meant that Gaddis had to really stress the colloquialisms and verbal ticks that come with everyday speech.
Eventually, once the reader has hit a pace and is in the thrall of Gaddis' prose, we know who is talking without needing to be told.
Gaddis' characterisation and his dialogue almost render the need for a screenplay void - just read from the novel, read the dialogue as it was written.
And the verbose interludes in the present-continuous, those serve within the novel as transition shots, as the camera floating from one telephone line and room into another, or as its rise above the trees of the Bast garden into the car of his cousin, Stella Angel.
In a sense, there has yet to be another novel so formally close to the screenplay (yet of course, JR is so much more).

With a massive cast of characters who continually bump into each other’s lives, plot threads which wrap around the central conceit (a satirical attack on free-market capitalism - how timely, eh...) and dialogue that is ready, JR would be perfect.
We would have the wit of The West Wing, and the bite of Breaking Bad; we would have a chance to move Mad Men into the 1970s and indulge in the period detail that is a trademark of these shows. 

If the modern box set could make millions fall in love with subjects as traditionally unpopular (to the majority) as shadow monsters popping out of vaginas, and the graphic ripping apart of limbs and innards, surely we can find a space for a satirical, scathing and hilarious take on free-market economics as exploited by an eleven year-old boy.

(Just so long as Edward Bast is played by Vincent Kartheiser).