A long, in depth article in the NYT Magazine on bringing Sendak’s masterpiece to the screen, via Spike Jonze, who is apparently all kinds fo awesome. I have such high hopes for this film. I just hope my boy doesn’t freak out when he sees it. He forced me to turn off Stuart Little twenty minutes in because he was so disgusted by the liberties taken with the plot. Honestly, he was INCENSED. “How DARE they?” he asked. And has since refused to rent Charlotte’s Web, Despereaux or any other book-to-movie adaptation. I’m kind of proud, but we’re running out of movies.

In Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” a child hammers some nails into a wall, is sent to his room without any supper and finds solace and wild fun on an island of monsters who pronounce him king. Considering Jonze’s own propensity toward mischief, it was tempting to see his fight with the studio (which, by the time I sat down with him, was more than a year old) as an embodiment of the eternal struggle between freedom-seeking child and authoritarian parent. Jonze chose a different family metaphor. “It’s like the studio was expecting a boy, and I gave birth to a girl,” he told me. “And now they’re learning to love and accept their daughter.”

The studio, for its part, was doing its best to give the impression that it had fully embraced Jonze’s vision. “This is an incredibly personal and intimate movie, and that’s going to work with all audiences,” Sue Kroll, the head of marketing at Warner Brothers, assured me. But observers both inside and outside of Hollywood remained skeptical. One former high-placed Warner Brothers executive I spoke to said that the studio had, in recent years, become less hospitable to unconventional directors like Jonze. Faced with a strange beast like “Where the Wild Things Are,” he explained, Warner’s executives didn’t always know what to do. “The studio is set up to be a big-movie, big-star, big-spectacle money-making machine,” he said, “and it views anything other than that with enormous trepidation.”

For a time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the prospects for unorthodox moviemaking in Hollywood appeared promising. Prompted by the phenomenal success of “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, the big Hollywood studios tentatively opened their gates (and their wallets) to a new generation of “independent” directors, among them Jonze and his friends David O. Russell and Alexander Payne. In 2003, when Jonze was just starting work on “Where the Wild Things Are,” Warner Brothers established a boutique division that went on to put out movies like “Before Sunset” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” But five years later, Warner Brothers Independent, like many other prestige units in Hollywood, was shut down by its parent studio, and “Where the Wild Things Are” began to feel a little like a relic, an artifact from some freewheeling, irretrievable past. When I sat down with Jonze, I’d just seen a rough cut of the movie, and although I’d been expecting something unusual, I hadn’t quite been prepared for either the Cassavetes-speak or the lack of any clear conflict or resolution. I told Jonze I’d imagined something more along the lines of a traditional children’s fantasy film, something like “Harry Potter,” for example.

He looked at me as if I’d let him down. “It’s in the visual language of, like, some sort of fantasy film, and it is a fantasy film to some degree,” he acknowledged, “but the tone of it is its own tone. We wanted it all to feel true to a 9-year-old and not have some big movie speech where a 9-year-old is suddenly reciting the wisdom of the sage.” He hadn’t set out to make a children’s movie, he said, so much as to accurately depict childhood. “Everything we did, all the decisions that we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9.”