The Crossed-Out Notebook

August 15, 2019
A screenwriter is held captive by a director demanding a brilliant script in this film-world satire. Auteur theory, schmauteur theory is the prevailing sentiment of the debut novel by Argentine writer Giacobone, who co-wrote the 2014 Oscar-winning film Birdman. Pablo, the narrator, has written two uncredited scripts for acclaimed director Santiago in his ill-lit basement; Pablo is "not imprisoned; basemented," he says, but Santiago won't let him loose and enjoys making threats with a gun to keep him working. The stakes are higher for the third script, which Santiago insists must be a world-beating classic; Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and Sean Penn are attached. But Pablo's writer's block is acute, and he's increasingly resentful of Santiago, who won't give him a writing credit and delivers lame critiques of the script in progress. ("The greatest Latin American director of all time is addicted to platitudes and cheese," Pablo confides in his notebook. "Maybe that's why he's the greatest.") It's a good setup for a moody thriller: Will Pablo deliver a masterpiece? Can he escape Santiago's clutches? Of course, that one's already been made (Stephen King's Misery), so Giacobone's story takes a more meandering, philosophical approach. The novel comprises the notebooks and encrypted Word files Pablo fills when he's not working on the script, stuffed with meditations on music (especially the Beatles), literature (especially Borges and Beckett), and great scripts (Peter Shaffer's Amadeus in particular). Via Pablo, Giacobone eagerly explores the nature of inspiration and film's essence as a collaborative art. But he also keeps the prose breezy; much of the novel is delivered in snappy, witty one-sentence paragraphs. And he assuredly ratchets up the tension as Pablo's deadline approaches, making the final act a twisty revenge fantasy against formulaic art-making of all sorts. A clever meditation on the joys and agonies of creativity, enlivened by its pressure-cooker plot.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 9, 2019
Giacobone, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Birdman, contributes a mind-bending addition to the Latin American tradition of metafiction in his clever debut. Pablo Betances, a talented but unknown screenwriter, believes he’s had a lucky break when his friend’s girlfriend passes his screenplay to famous film director Santiago Salvatierra. Instead, Salvatierra kidnaps Pablo and imprisons him in his basement, forcing him to write a screenplay that Salvatierra intends to take credit for. Pablo is brought sustenance by the housekeeper (whose cooking gives him hemorrhoids), listens to The Beatles on repeat, and has endless arguments with Salvatierra about plot ideas and edits to the screenplays he is being forced to write. After five years in his basement prison, during which time he’s written two successful screenplays, he is tasked with writing his final screenplay: the one that will change the history of film and cement Salvatierra’s reputation as the greatest director/writer in the world. While a movie is eventually made, it subverts both Pablo and Salvatierra’s ideas of what filmmaking can be. Pablo’s journal entries detailing his ridiculous situation and creative anxiety are humorous, insightful, and pointedly sardonic as he draws from and imitates with delightful absurdity the writing of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. Giacobone’s superb novel entertainingly dredges the neural recesses of how art is created, what it means to be authentic, and if potential can ever truly be harnessed.

August 1, 2019
Giacobone, co-writer of the Academy Award winning film Birdman, chronicles the plight of an aspiring screenwriter imprisoned by an acclaimed director in his debut novel. Pablo Betances is in his forties, living in an apartment in Buenos Aires with his widowed mother, toiling away on screenplays he thinks just might be pretty good when, at a friend's behest, he sends his latest screenplay to renowned Argentine film director Santiago Salvatierra. Santiago loves it so much that he invites Pablo to visit him, then imprisons the scribe in his basement, demanding that Pablo pen screenplays that Santiago will direct and claim as his own. We meet Pablo five years into his captivity, having been tasked by Santiago to write the screenplay that will "change the history of world cinema." As Pablo sets out to complete this impossible mission, he clashes with the arrogant Santiago and muses on his evolution as a writer and the complicated love/hate relationship every writer has with his or her work. A smart, introspective, and gripping examination of the burdens and joys of the writing life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)