Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys is a 2000 feature film based on the 1995 novel of the same title by Michael Chabon. Directed by Curtis Hanson, it stars Michael Douglas as professor Grady Tripp, a novelist who teaches creative writing at an unnamed Pittsburgh university. He has been unable to finish his second novel, his young wife has left him, and he is sleeping with his boss’s wife (Frances McDormand), who is also the Chancellor of the university. Grady's editor (Robert Downey Jr.) is in town to take a look at the book and becomes interested in a book that a student (Tobey Maguire) from Grady's creative writing class has just completed.


Wonder Boys was filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, including locations at Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, and Shady Side Academy. Other Pennsylvania locations included Beaver, Rochester and Rostraver Township. The film reunited Katie Holmes and Maguire, who had appeared together three years earlier in The Ice Storm.
After Wonder Boys failed at the box office, there was a second attempt to find an audience with a new marketing campaign and a November 8, 2000, re-release, which was also a financial disappointment.

Douglas delivers one of his most compelling performances as Grady Tripp, a disheveled, perpetually adolescent English professor amiably coasting toward a mid-life crisis. On the inaugural day of his university's literary festival, Grady's third wife leaves him and his mistress, university chancellor Sara Gaskell (McDormand), announces that she's pregnant with their child. Her husband Walter (Thomas), the self-absorbed chair of the English department, suspects nothing, but with a baby on the way scandal looms just over the horizon. 

To further complicate matters, Grady's reckless editor Terry Crabtree (Downey), desperate to revive his flaccid career, flies in from New York to pick up the manuscript for Grady's seven-years-in-the-making follow-up to his critically acclaimed first book -- but at 2612 pages, it remains far from finished. As if that weren't enough to keep him reeling, Grady soon becomes an unwilling accomplice to a canine homicide and the heist of a rare jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe, both committed by his brightest student -- the languid, slightly pathological James Leer (Maguire). Dressed in a ratty pink bathrobe and driving a stolen car with a dead dog in the trunk, Grady must now find a way to return Marilyn's coat, write the great American novel, nurture James's literary talents, discourage the advances of an amorous co-ed (Holmes), avoid the wrath of a petite James Brown look-alike (Knox), and reconcile with Sara...all before the weekend is over!

In its opening weekend, the film opened at #7 in the North American box office and grossed a total of USD $5.8 million in 1,253 theaters. It went on to gross a total of $33.4 million worldwide.

Wonder Boys currently holds an 83 percent "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes and a 73 metascore at Metacritic. Roger Ebert, a film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, praised Wonder Boys as "the most accurate movie about campus life that I can remember. It is accurate, not because it captures intellectual debate or campus politics, but because it knows two things:
(1) Students come and go, but the faculty actually lives there, and
(2) many faculty members stay stuck in graduate-student mode for decades".

Source:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185014/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Boys_(film)
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wonder_boys/