“To All the Books”
Written, directed, and starring Josh Malerman
Reality shows like “Project Runway” and “Top Chef” become hits not just because of the contestants’ big personalities, but also because they allow us to peek behind the curtain of creativity. We listen as these artists work to create something beautiful, and we get to see the final projects.
Writing is not generally a visual art, so its creation doesn’t really lend itself to TV or film as readily — not to mention that a lot of writers are introverted wallflowers who wouldn’t exactly light up a screen (ahem).
Michigan-based horror author Josh Malerman, whose “Bird Box” became a hit 2018 Netflix film, is a far cry from that kind of human, however. His documentary, “To All the Books,” which chronicles the creation of one of his novels from start to finish, is as quirky, charming, inspiring, funny, and thoughtful as he is. (Malerman is touring the country with the film, but it will also soon be available on streaming services.)
At the start, we see Malerman using his fun, colorfully decorated home as his canvas. Writing with a marker on a white door, he begins to loosely outline, from an opening image, a new novel he’s about to write called “It Tolls for Thee.” (At one point, he directs our attention high up onto a nearby wall to show us where his pre-scribblings for “Incidents Around the House” remain.) He sketches a man being pushed down a stone hallway and then locked in a cell, where he hears the loud, steady ticking of a clock.
Soon Malerman’s door is filled with details, doodles, questions, and potential backstory, and once he — surrounded by cats, dogs, art (some of which was created by his wife), and mood-setting music (which he created this time with a bandmate from the High Strung, to avoid copyright problems) — determines the name of his main character, he’s off, typing on his laptop.
Don’t worry, though. That’s not what you’re watching for the rest of the film’s running time.
Instead, you see Malerman revisiting his earliest manuscripts (and his stacks of published books), and reflecting on what’s important to him about working with different kinds of publishers; you see him, his wife, and his dogs bounding and playing in the snow; you see him figuring out moments in the story with the help of a diorama and cartoonish, paper doll-like figures that act out a scene; you see him celebrating holidays with friends, then forcing himself to keep to his writing schedule even when he’s hungover; you see him during the tricky middle of the process, when he questions whether the story he’s writing is the “right” one; you see him sending off copies of a past book to streaming services, hoping for another adaptation deal (“Incidents” became “Other Mommy,” in theaters now); and you see him experiencing childlike wonder when he realizes that all the terms on a metronome, which he’s using to name the book’s chapters, have been used up just as he reaches the book’s final chapter. He seems both surprised and not at all surprised by this cosmic coincidence.
Ultimately, the film’s homemade, unpolished, warts-and-all visual style, and its charmingly unique marriage of playfulness and substantive reflections on writing, make “To All the Books” pretty much impossible to resist. Generally, writers tend to be a serious lot who often focus on the anxiety and difficulties that are part of the writing process. Malerman — who filmed much of the movie himself, accumulating about 50 hours of footage — primarily lives in the joy of it, so that even when he’s a little stuck, he doesn’t drown in doubt or complain. He pauses. He plays. Then he gets back to it.
How refreshing is that?
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