Magnolia Goes the Extra Mile for ‘The Extra Man’

Magnolia Pictures have done some late Sundance shopping, grabbing the rights to Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s The Extra Man, a comedy that I managed to miss in Park City due to a conflict in my schedule. I’ll have to wait until late July or show up at the Sarasota and Boston Film Festivals if I want an advance screening. I assume that this deal was signed and delivered some time ago, perhaps sold at a “rebate” from the Wild Bunch folks. This is the third film for the Berman and Pulcini duo, who blasted onto the scene with the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning American Splendor.

Based on a screenplay adapted by Pulcini, Springer Berman and Jonathan Ames from Ames’ novel of the same title, Louis Ives (Dano) fancies himself a hero in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. He favors neckties, blue blazers, and sport coats. After an embarrassing incident involving a brassiere fetish, he loses his teaching job at a Princeton prep school and heads to New York to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. In New York, he rents a room in the madly discombobulated apartment of Henry Harrison (Kline), a failed but brilliant playwright who dances alone to old Broadway records, sneaks into the opera, and performs, with great style, the duties of an “extra man” — an escort for the rich widows of the Upper East Side. While Louis dreams of escorting dowagers himself one day, he becomes infatuated with Mary (Holmes), a socially-aware co-worker at the environmental magazine where he is employed and befriends Gershon (Reilly), Henry’s hirsute musical neighbor. The two men (Kline and Dano), separated in age by more than forty years, eventually develop an irascibl mentor/apprentice relationship, and they form a bond the depths of which is hardly expected.