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kept letting me re-option the rights every year, because I kind of had to feed my family -- I could only write when I wasn't doing other jobs. It took five years before it really started to get rolling," Gregg says. "And then when the time came to make the movie, he made real, giant financial concessions that allowed the movie to be made period, but also to be made in what I felt was the only successful way to be made without being meddled with, which was tiny, for no money, guerilla filmmaking, in a steaming mental hospital in New Jersey. It wouldn't have happened if he hadn't done that. And you know, it's easy to talk the talk. But when push comes to shove, especially in Hollywood, 'As long as it doesn't cost me any money' is usually the mantra. He really stepped up."

It also helped that Palahniuk was so unobtrusive during Gregg's long adaptation process. "I had one phone call with him right after I got the option," Gregg says. "I said, 'You might want to end this really quickly, because I feel like the engine underneath this thing is like a punk romantic comedy. And he was like, 'Oh, thank God. You got it! Go write. Don't be too faithful.'

"I didn't buy that. I thought it was just good manners -- or some Jedi mind test. And you know, I had no desire not to be faithful. I kind of signed up because I thought the book would make a great movie, you know? So I spent about a year and a half being super-faithful, and trying not to screw up a book I loved."

But Gregg discovered that didn't really work. "You just can't create anything worth a shit from a point of view of trying not to screw it up," he says. "You're essentially turning something, in terms of physics, from one state to another. To exist as a solid, it just doesn't get to be a gas anymore. It can't be a book. So I struggled for a while and had a really faithful adaptation that was just kind of stinky. And it wasn't until I kind of hit the end of my rope, into a depression, really, and threw it in my drawer, and kind of just started to channel it as though it was a dream I had, and what did I remember from it. And it started to filter in a little bit."

He did that by re-focusing the script on Victor Mancini, the aforementioned sex-addicted, historical re-enacting protagonist. "You have to strategize. Of all the brilliant, funny stuff in the book, what's the core of it you have to focus on? What's the journey of the main guy, and how does everybody else play into that?"

With the script tightened, the next step was finding his ...

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