American History

Down these mean streets, a man must go: Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar.

American Splendor’s creators on the search for the “real” Harvey Pekar.

by Sam Adams

Who is Harvey Pekar?

It is, apparently, a question worth asking more than once. As the refrain of "The Harvey Pekar Name Story," published in the first issue of his autobiographical comic book, American Splendor, the question -- spurred by the appearance of two other Harvey Pekars in the telephone directory of his native Cleveland -- mixes ontological inquiry with radio-serial suspense, culminating in a wordless panel thatís the comic-book equivalent of a shrug. In American Splendor, the movie, it resurfaces, posed by actor Paul Giamatti, whose performance as the comic-book Pekar alternates, and sometimes collides, with footage of the real-life Pekar. Still, the question remains: Who is Harvey Pekar?

Rather than provide a definitive answer, the movie, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, offers multiple choices, literally -- it actually contains three different Pekars, the last featured in a stage version of American Splendor, watched with horror by a slack-jawed Giamatti. The more you learn about Pekar, the more answers proliferate: a nationally published jazz and literary critic, award-winning NPR commentator, onetime Letterman favorite (and current Letterman pariah), hospital file clerk, cancer survivor, foster father, autodidact, crank and, not incidentally, the writer of dozens of issues of American Splendor, whose 27-year run has featured such notable illustrators as Joe Sacco, Drew Friedman, Jim Woodring, Chester Brown, Frank Stack, Paul Mavrides, Spain Rodriguez and, most famously, R. Crumb, whom Pekar befriended as a young greeting-card artist in 1962.

It's a resumé that would make most people's heads spin, but if you haven't guessed it, Harvey Pekar is hardly most people. He's experienced minor-league celebrity and critical plaudits before, and all it did was raise the hope that he might some day be able to quit his "flunky government job" and live off sales of the comic, which have stoutly refused to rise above several thousand copies per issue. This time, Pekar comes prepared. "Right now, what's really important to me is to convert some of this publicity into money," he says in his characteristic rasp. "That's the thing I'm constantly concerned about."

Readers of the American Splendor comics would expect no less from Pekar, who has unflinchingly portrayed his financial struggles and career frustrations since the beginning. But Berman, who co-wrote and -directed the movie with husband Pulcini, cautions against taking Pekar's cynicism too literally. "Harvey really wanted this movie to get made," she says. "On the surface, he said he wanted it for the money, but you could tell there was more going on, that he also wanted greater recognition, a bigger readership, some kind of legacy."

American Splendor represents the end of a long road for Pekar; the series has been optioned and developed so many times even Pekar can't remember them all. When I mention an attempt that would have had Pekar writing a script for American Movie director Chris Smith, Pekar asks, "How'd you know about that?" I wait a beat, to see if he's pulling my leg, then point out the information comes right from one of his own stories. "I've written so much stuff I can't keep track of it," he says wryly.

Likewise, Paul Giamatti's first leading role has been a long time coming. Though the actor, the son of the late Yale president and baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, has distinguished himself with small roles in movies like Private Parts and Saving Private Ryan, Splendor is Giamatti's first chance to carry a film. To prepare, he literally "charted out" Pekar's emotional state in each scene, mindful not to overwhelm the audience with misanthropy and self-loathing. "To watch him for two hours would be hard, even at his best," Giamatti says, affectionately, of the real Pekar. "The first time I read the script, I thought, it's so potentially miserable watching this guy sit and monologue, but it's necessary to see the guy just doing nothing but chewing himself up."

Though the movie's unique construction relieved Giamatti of the obligation to play the "real" Pekar, one of the greatest challenges the actor faced was discerning how much of Pekar's myth is his own creation. "He's created a pretty interesting persona for himself," Giamatti ventures, a point reinforced by the American Splendor story that shows Pekar plotting strategy before one of his later Letterman appearances. (Clips from several appear in the movie, although the anti-G.E. tirade that got Pekar banned from Letterman's NBC show had to be restaged.) "He was a much more approachable guy than I had been prepared for, even seeing him on Letterman, because he's playing a shtick. It interested me how much other people played into it."

For Berman and Pulcini, the challenge was how to fit the comic book's observational tone into a more conventional structure without losing its distinctive flavor. "Hypothetical Quandary," available in the newly published American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (Ballantine), finds Pekar fretting over how he'd handle the temptations of success, then pausing to smell the loaf of fresh bread he's just purchased: "Ah, fresh bread." As much as Pekar's confessional honesty, it's his skill at capturing such evanescent moments that makes the comic such a singular joy. (For further reading, check out Four Walls Eight Windows' The New American Splendor Anthology and Our Cancer Year. Sadly, Dark Horse Comics, Pekar's current publisher, has let most of the last decade's work fall out of print, although the new Unsung Hero collects the three most recent issues.)

Though, as Pulcini puts it, he and Berman conceived the movie as "the story of a man's relationship to his art," they make room for digressions like the one recounted in "Alice Quinn," where a meeting with an ex-high-school classmate prompts both a burst of self-loathing and a disquisition on Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt. Coming from a documentary background -- their films include Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's -- Berman says the couple has "a similar philosophy to Harvey, in that we see drama in places most people don't; we think that superficially boring, invisible lives are fascinating if you scratch the surface."

It was their background, too, that helped them find the structure of a 90-minute film in several hundred pages of unconnected comic-book stories. "Harvey's stories aren't related; they're moments," Pulcini explains. "It was our job to come in and build connections between them. It's a very similar process to editing a documentary."

So who is Harvey Pekar? If he's not the everyman sometimes claimed --how many everymen have strong views on the works of mile Zola? -- Berman and Pulcini have found audiences surprisingly willing to embrace their inner Harvey. When they took the movie to Cannes, Berman says, "we had all these French people coming up to us saying, ’I'm just like Harvey Pekar.' I kind of feel like Harvey's neuroses are universal. We all have a little bit of Harvey Pekar in us, whether we want to admit it or not." Harvey Pekar, c'est moi.

American Splendor opens Friday at Ritz East.

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