Wonder Boys - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Wonder Boys or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Wonder Boys

[violet]

Bearing in mind the film's interest in Marilyn Monroe, the character of Miss Antonia Sloviak, a tuba-playing transvestite, may be a nod to Monroe's film Some Like It Hot (1959), in which two men disguise themselves as women, and pose as members of an all-female band. (One of the men was played by Tony Curtis, which may have been the inspiration for Antonia's real name Tony.)

[frederick]

When James lists the actors who took their own lives, Everett Sloane was the only one to get a compliment.

[sara]

In the novel, Hannah Green is supposed to be a blonde 20 year old woman from Utah and her family is moron. This was changed when Katie Holmes was cast in the film because she has black hair. In the novel, she reads Grady's almost finished novel "Wonder Boys" much earlier than in the finished film where she gives Grady her opinion. The one aspect of her character that was kept in the film was that she also loved Grady as much as Sarah did like in the film.

[lonnie]

Books on James Leer's desk include Albert Camus's "The Plague," Truman Capote's "Answered Prayers," and Kenneth Anger's infamous "Hollywood Babylon."

[toni]

Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire would go on to play the roles of Iron Man and Spider-Man, respectively. Downey later starred as Iron Man alongside Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), and Avengers: Infinity War (2018).

[cameron]

The character of Vernon Hardapple, who both Terry and Grady dub in the film was also not an essential character in the novel as he is in the film. He does however do the things he does in the film like jumping on his own car that Grady does not know it is really Vernon's. He's also not married to Oola who is not in the novel except as a non-descriptive colorful waitress and also not named Oola.

[russell]

Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes appeared in The The Ice Storm (1997). Both movies have a classroom scene, where they are discussing literature.

[terry]

The term "Wonder Boys," a derivative of the German "wunderkind," refers to someone who has greatly succeeded in their profession or art at an early age. In the movie, Grady applies the term "Wonder Boy" to James specifically. During the DVD extras, Curtis Hanson also applies it to Grady, though not in an entirely flattering way, since in Grady's case, the term refers to his early literary promise on which he has failed to deliver. In Michael Chabon's novel "Wonder Boys" (upon which this movie is based), the term also doubles as the title of Grady's giant unfinished manuscript, and "Wonder" is the last name of the brothers who are the main characters in that book.

[morris]

The film takes place during the Winter into Spring. In Michael Chabon's novel, the Word Fest weekend takes place during the early Spring which would assumed to be late March early April during the school's Spring Break period.

[darrell]

Filmed in sequence.

[lonnie]

Michael Chabon, the film's author, would go on to be hired to write the Spider-Man 2 (2004) screenplay and featured Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and Peter Parker, who also co-starred in this film.

[linda]

Rip Torn and Alan Tudyk were both in the movie Dodgeball with Vince Vaughn.

[aaron]

James mentions his parents live in the town of Carvel. Carvel is the name of the fictional town where Andy Hardy and his family lived in the series of Andy Hardy films from the 1930s and 1940s. While James is watching television at Emily's house, he stops for a minute on Babes in Arms (1939), which (though not an Andy Hardy film) stars Mickey Rooney, who played Andy Hardy in sixteen movies, and Judy Garland, who appeared with Rooney in many of them.

[miriam]

Back-to-back films in which production designer Jeannine Oppewall was involved in a film starring Tobey Maguire. The other was Pleasantville (1998), while this film was in pre-production, where she was nominated for an Oscar for the second consecutive year in a row after her work on L.A. Confidential (1997), which was also directed by Curtis Hanson.