Michael's Version

“I got to smoke and drink and get laid in this movie and I got paid for it,” Paul Giamatti said as he accepted the Golden Globe Award for best actor in a comedy or musical for his performance in Barney’s Version.

From left to right: Bridegroom Barney (played by Paul Giamatti) and his father Izzy (played by Dustin Hoffman) down shots together at his Ritz wedding banquet in Barney's Version. | Photo by Takashi Seida. (Copyright: Serendipity Point Films/Sony Pictures Classics.)

He has Mordecai Richler to thank for creating such a character, of course – but he can also thank Concordia English literature grad Michael Konyves. 

It was Konyves (BA ’95) who adapted Richler’s Giller Prize-winning 1997 novel, Barney’s Version, for the screen. As a relative unknown with a few TV-movie scripts to his credit, he was an unlikely candidate to finally satisfy the demands of producer Robert Lantos, a friend of Richler’s who held the film rights to the book.

But there was something about the way Konyves interpreted the book that worked for Lantos in a way that the scripts of the four other screenwriters he’d approached – including two Oscar winners – hadn’t.

Left to right: Serendipity Point Films producer Robert Lantos, screenwriter Michael Konyves (second from end) and co-producer Ari Lantos (far right) pose with extra’s on location of Barney's Version in Rome. | Photo by Sabrina Lantos.

The main challenge was to condense the sprawling novel into a standard-length movie while maintaining its spirit.

“Konyves was very good at crystallizing and whittling down all the digressions and the anecdotal nature of the book into a very coherent, cogent, driving, disciplined story,” Richard J. Lewis, the film’s director, told the National Post.

Noah Richler would also appear to be pleased with the treatment of his late father’s final novel. "I think Michael Konyves, the screenwriter, has done an admirable job, and what is to be admired as much as anything else is what he's been able to strip away to make a coherent story. It's a tough art," Noah Richler told the Calgary Herald.

With feedback like that, not to mention Giamatti’s Golden Globe win, Konyves is no doubt on his way. Keep an eye peeled for more screen credits from this Concordia alumnus.

Related links:
•     Concordia’s Department of English
•     Barney’s Version trailer
•     How Barney’s Version jumped off the page and on to the screen, National Post, December 23, 2010
•     Screenwriting 101 with Michael Konyves, Bitchin’ Lifestyle, January 20, 2010
•     Barney’s Version website