in their 2002 "it list", "entertainment weekly" declared "kavalier & clay" the year's "it script", publishing a short excerpt from the screenplay. chabon told the publication, "a lot of things about the book are really a pain in the neck [to adapt]...the story takes place over this huge span of time. there's an 11-year gap in the middle when we don't see the characters at all. i wrote the first draft of the screenplay from memory, as if there were no novel at all and i were just remembering a story that i had heard... much less time passes in the movie than in the book. it's really just the period of the war." while at that point, the film was in active pre-production (with sydney pollack attached to direct and jude law in talks to play kavalier), by late 2004 chabon had declared the film project "very much dead".