Kavalier and Clay Showtime Series Gets Update from Akiva Goldsman
11"We're doing Kavalier & Clay, all of us, so, that's exciting." With this admission, writer/producer extraordinaire Akiva Goldsman (Star Trek: Picard, Fringe) surprised our very own Steve Weintraub, about to wrap up his interview with the man. Of course, when you bring up the forthcoming Showtime adaptation of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, you simply must delve deeper. And delve is what our own Steve Weintraub did.
If you've not heard of the novel, it's a work of brilliance about Jewish artists and writers who become key figures in the Golden Age of Comic Books during oppression faced in and after World War II. It's an expansive piece of work that folks have been trying to adapt for the screen for quite some time. But Goldsman seems confident this time's the charm, as he's gone to the original source to adapt it:
Michael and his wife Ayelet Waldman, together, they're writing the whole thing, and it is not a movie. The two of them and Alex Kurtzman and I, who are producing it with them, have sat around and got to do that thing that you wanna do with one of your favorite novels with the author in the room, which is go, 'What if you did -- and how do you --' And it's super fun.
Goldsman's description puts into stark terms how hands-on the original creative team of the novel are on the Showtime version -- so much so, that when asked whether it will be an ongoing series, limited season, or something in the middle, Goldsman replied: "I do know how long it is, and again I'm not gonna tell you, only because I feel like it's not actually mine to share. It's theirs to share. But I think that they are going to give it the breadth it deserves."
The show certainly seems to be in full script-writing swing, as part of a development deal between Chabon, Waldman, and CBS Television Studios. But has the thing actually been greenlit? Goldsman gave it to us straight:
I have no idea how greenlights work in television. I know that Michael and Ayelet are writing... Depending on different deal structures, two scripts can trigger it, ten scripts can trigger, no scripts can trigger, an actor can trigger, so I don't know what the construct of that is, simply because right now they're writing and that comes first.
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