CATCH-22

Richard Brown , Executive Producer of HBO’s True Detective , sat down with Aussie author Luke Davies (who wrote the book Candy & the recent Oscar-nominated film Lion)  and his writing collaborator Australian filmmaker David Michod (who wrote and directed the films Animal Kingdom, War Machine with Brad Pitt & The Rover) and they discussed ideas for a limited-series adaptation that would operate much in the same way that True Detective did – like a novel rather than a film. During that chat, a new adaptation of Joseph Heller’s classic satire Catch 22 was pitched. George Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov got involved soon after and the production was greenlit at Hulu in the US. Here in Australia, presumably because of their current deal with Disney, who own Hulu, it’s streaming on Stan.

 The book Catch 22 was adapted into a film in 1970 by Mike Nichols (who at the time had just done The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and as an adaptation, that version was not very successful – the book was undoubtedly too unwieldy to adapt for the screen at that time.

This new version of Catch 22 seems to have cracked the fragmented structure of the book and re-worked it more successfully into a coherent whole. It stars Christopher Abbott (Girls) as the main character John ‘Yo-Yo’ Yossarian, he’s a world-weary recruit making his way through basic training as a US Army Air Force bombardier in World War II and he’s having an existential crisis about combat and the fact that people he has never met are trying to kill him.

Soon he’s in Italy, running bombing raids into Germany and his slightly crazed base commander Colonel Cathcart (played by Kyle Chandler) keeps increasing the number of bombing raids that his men need to fly in order to complete their tours of duty. So Yossarian starts to consult with the base’s Doctor (played by the show’s producer/director Grant Heslov) to find out how he can avoid risking death with further bombing raids by saying he’s crazy.