Disney Blockbuster Has Columbia Connection

At first glance, Disney’s blockbuster hero movie “John Carter,” which opens March 9, would seem to have nothing to do with Columbia.

It’s set on Mars and based on a series of science-fiction novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of Tarzan, who passed away before Columbia was founded.

The film’s director, Andrew Stanton, who is making his live-action debut, is practically Hollywood royalty. He previously directed Pixar classics “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E.” And the movie’s estimated $250 million budget rivals the most expensive movies of the last five years.

But look behind the big details and you’ll find the screenplay was partly written by a native son of Columbia, author Michael Chabon, who is now a famous and respected writer living in California.

Chabon was born in Washington, D.C., in 1963, but spent most of his childhood in early Columbia, according to an entry about the writer in “Popular Contemporary Writers” by Michael Sharp.

“Columbia… count[ed] Chabon’s family among its pioneers,” wrote Sharp, “and its still-unfinished neighborhoods and still-unbuilt streets (with names drawn from the poems of Robinson Jeffers) provided young Chabon with a fanciful map—the Plan, tacked on his wall—that was only one among many of his own worlds of the imagination.”

Chabon’s family lived first in a house in the village of Harper’s Choice, and then moved to the village of Long Reach, where Chabon’s parents divorced, according to Sharp. His parents eventually moved out of Columbia, his father to Pittsburgh and mother to Arizona, and Michael split his time between them. But Sharp notes the affect Columbia had on a young Chabon.

“While still living in Columbia, surrounded by empty lots,” Sharp wrote, “he invented a make-believe place that he called Davoria, and when he was 13, he wrote his first story, about an unlikely encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Captain Nemo.”

Chabon caught his first big break when a literary agent in New York purchased his master’s thesis and published it with the title, “Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” in 1988, according to Sharp. Chabon quickly gained critical acclaim and continued to write.

He published his second novel, “Wonder Boys,” in 1995 and then in 2001 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”—a story about two Jewish cousins who create a series of comic books in the 1940s leading up to the entry of the United States in World War II.

As well as being a celebrated writer of novels and short stories, he dabbled in Hollywood before working on “John Carter.” He wrote the screen story for Spider-Man 2 and his novels, “Wonder Boys” and “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” have been made into movies, according to IMDB.com.

“More akin to a traditional storyteller than a fashionable novelist,” wrote Sharp, “Chabon writes for readers; he has thrills and wonders on every page. Like comic books, his novels—which are nonetheless extraordinary literature—spill naturally into film.”

Chabon co-wrote the screenplay for “John Carter” with Stanton and Mark Andrews. He recently told The New York Times that he was drawn to Burroughs’ stories, on which the movie is based, at a young age while still living in Columbia. “I was 11 or 12,” Mr. Chabon recalled recently, “and I thought: ‘What are these? This is something I ought to know about.’ It was a magical moment in my childhood."