Movies News

Many authors dream their book becomes a film blockbuster.  But writer Walter Kirn is pleasing the pessimistic aspect of fellow Minnesota script writer Garrison Keillor as he watches the picture side of his book, “Up in the Air,” climb to serious and box task success.

“I’m a Minnesotan,” Kirn tells to reporters. “We fancy too big, we’re going to be humbled.”

Paramount’s “Up in the Air” has pulled in $63.9 million domestically in seven weeks and won raves for actor George Clooney as a glossy ax-man racking up haunt-challenge miles as he fires workers for other companies.

Director Jason Reitman and co-screenwriter Sheldon Turner won Golden Globes for best screenplay Sunday, but “Avatar” director James Cameron and his box-office behemoth took top honors at the Globes. That could foreshadow the Academy Awards sprint; nominations are announced Feb. 2.

It’s not the first time a Kirn book has become a film. “Thumbsucker,” based on his adolescence in eastern Minnesota’s St. Croix River Valley, became a 2005 indie film starring Lou Pucci and Tilda Swinton.

Nevertheless “Up in the Air” is a mainstream hit and has “kicked the sales (of the book) in the seat considerably,” says Doubleday executive editor Gerry Howard.

Speaking from his home in Livingston, Mont. Kirn, 47, says he came up with the idea for Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, while next to a stranger on an escape in 1999.

“I curved to him and asked him where he was from and he said, ‘I’m from right here, this seat,’” Kirn recalls. The man said he had a residence in Atlanta but never used it and useless two thirds of the year roving.

“I felt like a zoologist who’d discovered a new species of monkey extreme in the jungle,” Kirn says.

“Up in the Air” hit bookshelves in July 2001 — weeks before Sept. 11.

“Then Sept. 11th happened and no one wanted to buy a book or indeed see a film set on airplanes,” Kirn recalls.

Nevertheless gear altered. Reitman found the book and identified with Bingham.

Reitman worked on the screenplay awaiting 2008, pausing to exact “Thank You for Smoking” (2005) and “Juno” (2007). Then the fiscal meltdown hit.

The movie went from being “about a man who was wearisome to body out his place in the world” to “a movie that spoke to hundreds of thousands of people who had perplexed their jobs,” he says.

Meanwhile, Turner says he read the book when it came out and became “obsessed” with it. Turner had written half a play when studio dealings fell through. Nevertheless he glossed the libretto, put it on a layer and eventually sold it.

Kirn says his only requirements were that the movie save the book’s title, chief character and Kirn’s worldview. And he would like moviegoers to know “Up in the Air” was a book first.

“I do get petulant at period that they’ve gone that there was this book it was based on. And it didn’t come out of nowhere.”