Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
RENI's one of the blokes who regularly stumbles drunkenly into our chat room here at AICN and challenges everyone in the joint to a fight. He's a right bastard when you get a few into him, so it's a good thing they kept him out of the pubs before he met the author of FIGHT CLUB and SURVIVOR last night. Here he is to explain it all to you in that oh-so-cool clipped Manchester accent. Enjoy...
Shuffled into town last night to catch Chuck Palahnuik reading excerpts from his books at Waterstones.
The reading room is small and intimate and Palahnuik, a dead ringer for Wolverine, is really at ease and down to earth.
Reading from Survivor, Chuck explains the trick ending and giving away it's clue somewhere on page 8.
Reading from Fight Club, he mentions how a lot of the speeches, the anarchy came from things he and friends used to do. On saturdays they'd all get dressed up smart, and head off to the Real Estate people and get shown around expensive looking homes, and rob all the uppers and pills they could find in the bathrooms and get wrecked.
He reads the Xmas dinner sex analogy from Invisble Monsters and I haven't read this one yet, but it's fucking funny.
There's a quick Q+A and people ask about the ending to the Fight Club flick and he says he likes it being different because so much of the book is already in the film, that he wanted to see something new in there.
I ask him about life at Fox now that the studio boss has left and Fight Club didn't do a box office Blitz. He says that Fight Club was really hated by Rupert Murdoch but adored by his son and daughter who basically optioned Survivor in spite of everything. He says Bill Mechanic was a great guy, very enthusiastic. Working with Fincher again maybe some time off, since he is keen on re-making a black and white film his dad made on the guy who produced Citizen Kane.
I ask him about developing the Survivor film and he says the only thing he knows for sure is that Gwyneth Paltrow's brother has written the script and on a Hollywood scale it gets an 8. Fox are rushing ahead with this to avoid the strikes too.
He doesn't give away too much about his new stuff. At the end of the signing myself and few others have a chat with him and he mentions he's just finished the manuscript for Choke, a book about therapy groups for sex maniacs, deviants, paedophiles. He says he hopes people find it funny.
So do I.
I am Reni.
I am Jack's smirking Triumph.