Traces of East Brunswick permeate Selznick’s world
Larger-than-life literary characters jump off the pages of Brian Selznick’s works l famed boy wizard Harry Potter, his own Caldecott Medal-winning Hugo Cabret.
But if you know where to look, you’ll also find traces of his hometown.
“East Brunswick has been very present in my work over the years,” Selznick, a 1984 East Brunswick High School graduate, said.
In 1996’s “Frindle,” written by Andrew Clements and illustrated by Selznick, Mrs. Granger is based on Mrs. Clevenger, an art teacher of Selznick’s at Churchill Junior High School.
In his contribution to the 2005 short story collection “Friends: Stories About New Friends, Old Friends, and Unexpectedly True Friends,” Selznick’s tale encompasses one of his earliest memories in town.
“When I was 5, we moved across East Brunswick to the house where I grew up and where my mom still lives. I remember the very first days of living in that house, the excitement of moving. In the backyard, there was an air conditioning unit with some red mud around it. Me and somebody who I became friends with, who lived next door, used to make mud McDonald’s food and let it dry in the sun.
“I remember the first day I was back there, I found all of these little plastic cowboy and Indian figures. They were tan and very, very small. And I remember at five, being very intrigued by the idea that there had been a kid living in the house before me that I didn’t know and wouldn’t know; but they had left behind these traces of themselves.”
Those small plastic figures loom large in his “Friends” story.
More recently, Selznick wrote a book called “Kaleidoscope” during the pandemic.
“(It) is a very strange series of short stories that are all told by a first-person narrator whose name and gender are never revealed. And in 24 stories, the narrator talks about someone named James who they loved very much, and in most of the stories James dies or disappears, and then the narrator is left having to deal with their grief. In each of the stories, James and the narrator change, so sometimes they’re adults and it’s a love story. Sometimes they’re children and they become friends. Sometimes one of them is a giant and one of them is an angel or one of them is a bat. And so like a kaleidoscope, that relationship keeps shifting and changing. One of the stories is set in an elementary school. Each chapter has one drawing and the elementary school that I drew is Warnsdorfer.”
East Brunswick Hall of Fame
Selznick is a 2024 inductee to the East Brunswick Education Foundation Hall of Fame.
The ceremony on April 2 also honored 1978 EBHS graduate and sports host, anchor and reporter Michael Barkann, while Partner in Excellence Awards will be presented to educators Danielle Blalock, Marilyn Edge and Dr. Arvin Gopal and the local business of Lindsay Schiappa Esq.
Fittingly, less overt than his direct mentions in ink but just as concrete, you’ll also find influences of growing up in East Brunswick l especially the educators who encouraged and inspired him l permeating Selznick’s body of work.
“I was very lucky and benefited from the fact that East Brunswick has always had a really fantastic arts program in their public schools. I always had really fantastic art teachers who gave me really great assignments and really took me under their wing when they saw that I loved doing art,” he said.
In addition to the “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” the basis for the Oscarwinning movie “Hugo,” directed by Martin Scorsese, as well as “Wonderstruck,” also turned into a major motion picture and for which he wrote the screenplay, and the 20th anniversary Harry Potter cover designs, Selznick counts among his work dozens of books including “The Doll People” trilogy in collaboration with Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin, multiple works with Clements and “Baby Monkey, Private Eye,” written with his husband David Serlin. Selznick also has written a new version of “The Nutcracker” ballet, multiple toy theater pieces and stage adaptations of his works.
Theater parallels
Selznick says he enjoys the parallels between theater, storytelling and bookmaking, and they can be traced to a love of theater that grew out of his experiences in East Brunswick.
While he says the support of many teachers, particularly in the art realm, is key to his successes, he points to beloved EBHS English and theater teacher Elliott Taubenslag in particular as a linchpin to his career.
“Because of my work with Mr. T, I’d always loved theater. In college I continued to act and design, and I designed sets, and I even for a while wanted to be a professional set designer. But I think that love of the theater that Mr. T instilled in me carried through after I finished with college and became a children’s book illustrator.”
After college, he continued to be involved in theater in New York and became a professional puppeteer. As he started to build his book career while working at Eeyore’s Books for Children in Manhattan, new connections started to become clear to him that highly influenced his style.
“There’s a lot of interesting parallels between theater and bookmaking,” he said. “You want your stories to feel theatrical, and it turned out that the turning of a page and a book could be very much like what happens when a curtain rises on stage to reveal something new, where the lights could go out and then they come back on and there’s something different happening on stage. I slowly began to realize these connections, and I always have found ways to work theater into my books.”
As a matter of fact, Selznick said, in his first book “The Houdini Box,” the first thing readers encounter sprung from the theater world.
“The first drawing is of closed curtains, and then the second drawing on the next page the curtains open to reveal the title. And then you turn the page and you move into the story,” he said.
Following the success of “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” Selznick says a lot of things changed in his life.
“I had taken a long time to make that book. I didn’t really know what the reaction to the book was going to be because I hadn’t ever made a book like it before. I hadn’t really seen a book like it before. And so the fact that it was embraced so widely by so many people, it was a wonderful surprise,” he said.
One that, of course, led to the creation of “Hugo” the film.
“When the movie was made, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people in the movie business. And to my surprise, I became friends with some of them. And so I suddenly found myself having the opportunity to tell more stories on the screen, to think about how a story could be adapted for film. I had been on the set for ‘Hugo’ and got to watch as Martin Scorsese made a movie. Besides the fact that it was my story, which was extraordinary, I think almost anybody would feel privileged to be able to be on a movie set and watch Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest film directors of all time, doing his job. And I was able to talk to him and learn about the history of film from him and his approach to storytelling. I found myself with a lot of really wonderful opportunities, and then also continued to be involved in theater, and have worked on several theatrical adaptations of my books, and continue to work on some of them. So the theater and the influence of Mr. T. definitely continues to this day.”
Visit thebrianselznick.com to keep up with Selznick’s work and find out what’s coming next for him.