A funny thing happened to Rawson Marshall Thurber en route to becoming just another film school-educated, underemployed Hollywood hopeful no one ever heard of.
In 2003, the self-described "sports nerd" and "comedy dork" wrote a winking, shaggy dog sports comedy called "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" with lead roles written with Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller in mind. By Thurber's recollection, every studio in town "passed on it twice." But he somehow sold "Dodgeball" to Fox with himself attached as director and landed his dream cast. Upon release, the movie stunned industry observers by besting Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks' "The Terminal" during the films' opening weekend in 2004 before going on to take in $114 million domestically.
Suddenly, the San Francisco-born writer-director went from zero to hero (well, sort of). "There were all these offers for me to do romantic comedies about competitive darts players. Or curling," he recalled. "I got seven competitive eating scripts."
But then another funny thing happened to Thurber en route to becoming the next Judd Apatow -- or at least, the next auteur of blow-Pepsi-out-your-nose-inducing, below-the-belt comedy. Against the advice of his agent ("He said: 'Capture the bouquet of this moment' -- do something that's very similar"), the 32-year-old followed up his "Dodgeball" success by making . . . a low-budget, independently financed art house drama.
His adaptation of Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon's first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," will premiere in competition tonight at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. "I guess it's the anti-follow-up," Thurber shrugged, biting into a croissandwich at a Hollywood diner days before leaving for North America's preeminent indie film fest. "It's a novel I have loved since I read it in '95. And I wanted to use whatever momentum, whatever juice I had, to make something that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise."
'Mysteries' casts a spell
In "Mysteries," protagonist Art Bechstein (played by Jon Foster) is the son of a mob money launderer who's confused about his family and his sexuality. The 23-year-old gets caught up in a love triangle with highly literate biker come jewelry thief Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard) and his "splendid" girlfriend Jane Bellwether (Sienna Miller). Much of the action takes place in the main character's head and a handful of gay sex scenes are key plot points.
