Art School Confidential: A Screenplay - Softcover

Daniel Clowes lives in Oakland, CA, with his wife and son.

Clowes' second screenplay, after the Oscar-nominated adaptation of his graphic novel Ghost World (1997), features a larger but equally eccentric cast of misfits. Its ripe-for-skewering setting is filled with naive, young would-be artists and jaded professors. The focal character is Jerome, a freshman equally obsessed with becoming the greatest artist of the twenty-first century and with getting somewhere with gorgeous model Audrey. The early scenes establishing the milieu and introducing the characters, many only by type (e.g., Beat Girl, Suburban Girl, Kiss-Ass), are the most entertaining. When the plot about a serial killer stalking the campus takes over, the story settles into something less compelling and more conventional (it doesn't help that the murderer's identity is pretty obvious). Fans of Clowes' comics may picture the characters in his distinctive visual style and wish he weren't trying to fit his peculiar sensibility into such worn frameworks as the coming-of-age story, the love story, and the murder mystery. What director Terry Zwigoff did with Clowes' script will be seen when the movie opens in April. Gordon Flagg
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