Movie Matchmaker: David Fincher's World War Z
by Brian Tallerico

On February 12 it was announced that the Coen brothers would be adapting Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Anyone who has read the book immediately saw the clouds part and heard a heavenly chorus. It was a perfect fit. It felt like the rare work of the movie Gods - the same ones who teamed up Joel and Ethan with Cormac McCarthy for No Country For Old Men, Peter Jackson with a little J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, and Terry Zwigoff with a hit graphic novel by Dan Clowes called Ghost World. Those are only three examples of where the auteur PERFECTLY matched the source material and it got us dreamers at The Deadbolt thinking about the future and wondering if we could play movie matchmaker to try and avoid another one of our favorite books being botched. Maybe we could even influence another dream movie match-up. Although we'd love to convince executives to do the right thing and take our movie matchmaker advice, we're simply trying to throw some good movie karma into the stratosphere. Believe it or not, between midnight sessions of Guitar Hero III, far too many season passes on our DVRs, and an iTunes account that should be suspended for the sake of our credit scores, we actually find time to read.

In our new recurring feature, Movie Matchmaker, we're going to do Hollywood a favor and advise them who they should hire to adapt a few of our favorite tomes. And, no, we're not talking about the "umpteenth" edition of Hamlet or Pride & Prejudice (at least not until we run out of books...watch for the case for "Rob Zombie's Hamlet" in about a year or so). For now, we're focusing on the recent-but-awesome unproduced novels, some of which are in a state of production and some that are merely the dreams of our avid readers. We're starting our matchmaking with one of the best books of the last few years, Max Brooks' World War Z.

THE BOOK:

Max Brooks was a writer for Saturday Night Live from 2001 to 2003 before publishing the insanely fun, mostly point-of-purchase title The Zombie Survival Guide. A handy book for when the apocalypse finally comes, Survival Guide is a fun read but it merely hints at the deeper idea that Brooks had about the world of zombies, which were fleshed out in 2006's World War Z. The book is structured with a series of interviews, an oral history of different people remembering the "great zombie war." From the early days of infection to the pandemic that took the world by storm, World War Z is a riveting collection of various accounts from around the world. The bad zombie fiction in film or literature often ignores the human aspect of watching your neighbor turn into a brain-eating freak, but it's the people of World War Z that make it so fascinating. Brooks uses a zombie war to comment on the world as a whole and how environmentalism, the global economy, the war on terror, and even the black market organ transplant world (imagine getting a heart from a horribly wrong donor) would turn into a world overrun by flesh-eating crazies. At times it's action-driven but it has a much larger focus, especially in the wake of real-world disasters like 9/11 and Katrina. It's not so much "what if there was a zombie war" but how we'd respond to it that makes World War Z so fascinating.

Movie Matchmaker: David Fincher's World War Z Page 2