A most modern sensibility

You could be forgiven for thinking the title of writer-director Robin Swicord’s upcoming movie, “The Jane Austen Book Club,” gives it all away.

It is a movie about a book club. And the book club is reading “all Jane Austen, all the time,” as its members are fond of saying.

Swicord, 54, is the first to admit that the premise of her directorial debut sounds, well, boring. “Doesn’t that sound like the deadliest movie you’ve ever seen? Let’s watch six people in a room talking about books,” she said over tea and cake at her Santa Monica home, where she lives with her husband and fellow screenwriter Nick Kazan (their daughters have moved eastward to pursue film and acting).

The house would be a perfect setting for a book club meeting. It’s a blue cottage brimming with history and homeyness -- the rusted Underwood typewriter on the front porch, the wall full of family photographs in the hall -- where tea is served from a pot tucked under a cozy. The many photographs include one of Swicord’s father-in-law, Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, as an infant.

But Swicord isn’t a member of a book club -- she just felt drawn, she said, to adapt Karen Joy Fowler’s bestselling novel for the screen. “It’s a deceptive title,” Swicord said. “Yes, it is a Jane Austen book club. But it’s about contemporary lives.”

Swicord’s film could even be called a non-literary movie about literature. It’s a Jane Austen film without being an adaptation of her work, and without containing any corsets or curricles (“the Porsche of the Austen era,” Swicord is quick to explain). The idea was not to hit the bookish notes too hard, but instead to take the romantic confusion, misunderstood men and cautiously happy endings of an Austen novel and drop it all into present-day Sacramento. Swicord even recruited an action-movie editor to help put the film together in a fast-paced style. “I wanted that sense of looks flying, people not commenting when they want to comment. It had to clip along,” she said.

Still, when Swicord tried to get her cast into the spirit by hosting a book club meeting to discuss “Emma,” she was a little surprised at the response.

“Maggie Grace was the only one who’d done her homework,” Swicord said, citing the actress who plays book clubber Allegra. “Everyone else had pulled stuff off the Internet. But as we talked, people began to say, ‘I wish I’d read the book.’ It was so funny to watch their interest in Austen ignite.”

Grace, last seen on ABC’s “Lost,” admitted she was “a little thrown” that other cast members hadn’t read the book. But, she said, “The group just came together immediately, and it felt more like doing a play.”

Grace said she started reading Austen when she was 13 and considers herself a true Janeite, but even she has never been in any kind of book club. “It’s an added bonus if you can catch the Austen details, but really it’s a very identifiable film,” Grace said. “It’s a movie about trying to find a sense of community in chaotic modern life, and finding an urban family.”

The book as springboard

Indeed, everyone involved in the movie seemed to gravitate more to the idea of group therapy as a model for what goes on in the movie. Much of the discussion in the film’s book club meetings is thinly veiled talk of members’ love lives. “It does feel like group therapy,” Swicord said. Producer and former Sony Pictures studio head John Calley echoed that sentiment. “The ‘Jane Austen Book Club’ is a metaphor for group analysis,” Calley said, “and it deals with many of the problems of domestic living that we’re all experiencing.”

A mother and daughter fight about whether to give in to romantic passion just like the Dashwood sisters of “Sense and Sensibility.” Matchmaker Jocelyn is an updated Emma -- she recruits Grigg, the male of the group, in hopes that he’ll mate with a recently separated fellow book clubber. That intrepid man, in turn, recalls the swoon-worthy Mr. Darcy of “Pride and Prejudice,” thanks to the women’s slow-to-change prejudice against his sci-fi fanaticism and thanks to an adaptive twist by Swicord. She granted him a Silicon Valley IT pedigree, and with it, possession of a good fortune.

Swicord is no stranger to such tricks of adaptation -- rounding out a character, giving his or her internal life an external representation for the screen, adding what she calls “the expanded dimension of spectacle and sound.” After pursuing theater and producing television news and educational films earlier in her career, Swicord began to write for film. The South Carolina native has since adapted the revered “Little Women” and the kids’ classic “Matilda,” among others.

“I enjoy adapting. I like that sense of communion you get with another writer,” she said. “You start to take the book apart, like a tailor taking apart a couture dress. You start to see how it was made and you develop a real appreciation for the designer . . . . but when you make a change, you don’t want it to seem like criticism. The ballet ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is not the fairy tale you read -- they’re both ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ but they take place in different forms.”

Swicord notes that original screenplays, which she has also written, are harder to get made. “Maybe I’m deluding myself,” Swicord said, “But I think it has something to do with the name-brand value of a published novel.”

Fowler’s novel -- despite its rapid-fire dialogue and its built-in fan base, whether Austenite or Fowlerite or both -- presented challenges for Swicord because of its nontraditional structure. Instead of having a beginning, middle and end, the book to Swicord seemed like six stand-alone short stories, each centered on one Austen book and one character whose childhood traumas are revealed in flashback and eventually come to bear on book club discussions and romantic entanglements.

“I think Robin saw quite quickly how it could be a movie,” Fowler said by phone. “It is a movie because she had that vision of it, and went in with the book in one hand, but more importantly with her own vision.”

Swicord shaved the characters’ flashbacks for narrative and financial reasons. “We couldn’t really do a 1960s Hollywood party” -- where the character Grigg has a falling out with his father -- on a less-than-$6-million budget, Swicord said. Fowler agreed. “She couldn’t have done it any differently. It’s not a six-hour miniseries,” the author said.

Fowler did wish, however, that the film had more of the echoes of Austen that she had included in her book. But Swicord was clear on her desire not to take “a strong intellectual approach.”

The author as subject

Not that Swicord doesn’t love Austen. Though she can’t pick an all-time favorite, “Persuasion” is Swicord’s current best-loved Austen work. “I don’t think I fully appreciated the novel,” she said, “until I got old enough to have regrets.”

Before producer Calley introduced her to Fowler’s novel, Swicord was busy researching Austen’s life and criticism of her work for an original screenplay, “The Jane Prize,” about a family of Austen scholars, which she postponed to do “The Jane Austen Book Club.” “There are some people who are very dedicated to the cult of Jane,” Swicord said. “I appreciate those people enormously, and I am a hair’s breadth away from that myself.” Swicord invited some of them -- members of the Jane Austen Society of North America, a group Swicord has been tempted to join -- to the “Book Club” set.

Swicord said that as she envisioned the movie, she did not let Austen mania -- or the seemingly never-ending parade of other recent Austen-focused movies -- intimidate her. “Honestly I thought that women who love to read will come see this movie,” Swicord said. “That was about as ambitious as I got.”

And that was ambitious enough for Calley, who said, “There aren’t enough women’s films. They’re an enormous segment of the audience and they’re more intelligent.”

Still, Swicord and Calley noted that men who’ve seen the film have liked it almost as much as the women. “We didn’t make this cynically as a woman’s flick,” Calley said. “We thought if we made it well there would be an audience.”

At the very least, they can appreciate the good-looking cast, as a group of Swicord’s daughter’s friends did. Swicord mimicked them with lowered voice and youthful male parlance, “Dude, Maria Bello, she’s hot.”

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swati.pandey@latimes.com