![]() Following a relapse into addiction (this time to the bug powder he uses for his work) and the (possibly) accidental murder of his wife Joan (Judy Davis) during an inebriated game of William Tell, he flees to Interzone, a Tangiers-like city beset by conspiracy and swarming with all types of strange creatures, including insect-typewriter hybrids that speak through asshole-mouths, giant insectoid creatures called Mugwumps that excrete an intoxicating substance from penile glands on along their skulls, writhing sex blobs and sex-shifting mad scientists. Burroughs becomes Bill Lee (Peter Weller), a recovering junkie and would-be novelist turned exterminator. Rather than attempt to make a faithful adaptation of Naked Lunch-an impossibility, given that the book is comprised of a series of hallucinatory vignettes written in stream of consciousness and reassembled using a cut-up collage technique-Cronenberg instead formed a loose (at times nigh impenetrable) narrative around individual scenes from the novel and several others of Burroughs’s works, combined with some of the more infamous episodes from his biography (namely, the accidental murder of his wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951). Following the critical acclaim of that film, he embarked on his dream project of adapting Burroughs’ seminal-and I mean that in both senses of the word-Beat novel of paranoia, hedonism, addiction and black comic despair. But Cronenberg-who before moving into film sought to be a novelist in the vein of Burroughs and Vladimir Nabakov-never saw himself a horror director exclusively, and by 1991 he’d already moved away from the strict confines of genre with his chilling psychological character study of two years prior, Dead Ringers. Meanwhile, David Cronenberg, who’d established himself as a cult favorite about a decade earlier with a string of perverse, low budget body horror movies in his native Canada, had steadily risen to become one of the most fervently admired directors in all of horror thanks to a couple of crossover hits ( The Dead Zone, The Fly). ![]() Whatta ya need, a roadmap?”) for one of the major studios, only to face a case of writer’s block so severe that it spirals into a reality-bending, existential meltdown. ![]() Thus was born Barton Fink, the story of a politically fervent, but pretentious and naive New York playwright (Turturro) lured to Hollywood to write a simple B-movie (“Wallace Beery. The brothers were busy scripting their Prohibition-era gangster picture Miller’s Crossing when they hit a wall-not so much writer’s block as writer’s congestion-and sought to divert themselves with a new script, one that tackled the often grim and pained process that is the writing. ![]() The wild inventiveness displayed in those films made the duo amongst the most exciting young directors at the time, but no one knew quite what to expect from them next-themselves included. When Barton Fink hit theaters in August of ’91, three months after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival-where it picked up prizes for Joel Coen and John Turturro (for Best Director and Actor, respectively) on its way to winning the Palme d’Or-the Coens only had two previous features to their name: the grisly neo-noir Blood Simple and the slapstick romantic crime comedy Raising Arizona.
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