re: East of Eden (Netflix) Teaser

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This x 1000! Cathy Ames was a vile human being. She's one of the greatest villains in literature. She's a sociopath who destroys the lives of everyone she touches with no remorse. I'll be very disappointed if they retcon her character into some sort of victim.

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I may be too optimistic but I highly doubt they make her a victim. This show runners grandpa (I think) was the creator of a very good adaption of East of Eden. She has spoken about this story being very near and dear to her and her family.

Cathy being the focus is obviously a different take but Cathy is the most interesting character and doesn't mean you are retconning the entire story by having her as the main POV.

And the "modern audience/anti-hero" was a line from the article, not a quote from the showrunner.

I'm going to hold out hope it's good and be massively disappointed if it's a drastic change from the novel. One of the greatest novels ever written imo.

It's going to be tough to follow Elia Kazan, James Dean, Raymond Massey, Julie Christie and Burl Ives but I'll give it a shot

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I agree completely. She is the only reason I am okay with shifting it to Cathy’s perspective.

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the whole thing is from Cathy's perspective?

Thats gonna be brutal, Cathy has zero redeeming qualities. She is an absolute piece of shite is proud of it, there is zero pay off with her. They are gonna have to change some things I think because a whole show following her would be tough

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focusing new attention on its indelible antihero, Cathy Ames

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this makes zero sense, in now way is she an anit hero. She is an absolute piece of shite with zero redemption.

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the whole thing is from Cathy's perspective?

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Kazan’s grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film version of East of Eden, which made James Dean a household name.

“The movie isn’t a super faithful adaptation of the small part of the book that it is adapting,” Kazan said of her grandfather’s adaptation. “What I felt was the whole epic story is an opportunity to explore, to fall in love with all these characters.”

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She is covering the whole book. Cathy is the main POV but it's telling the whole story.

Here's some more of her interview. Take it for what you will...

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The character, she says, “was unlike anyone I’d ever read before. There’s a real clarity to the quality of her selfishness, which I found completely fascinating.” She was also fascinated by Steinbeck’s relationship to his creation, which took on a power that caught even the author by surprise. In letters Steinbeck wrote to his editor that were later collected for a volume called Journal of a Novel, “he starts out by being like, ‘I’m gonna write a monster unlike any you’ve ever seen before,’” Kazan explains. “And within 80 pages in those diaries, he’s saying, ‘I think I am Cathy. Cathy is me. Maybe I am the monster.’ Her agency was so strong, and she kind of took over the book.” By the end of the novel, Steinbeck seems to be wrestling with her overpowering force: “I think he punishes her, in a way, for having so much agency. It feels like he’s trying to put her in her place.”

In adapting the book, Kazan set out to give Cathy her due—not to make a revisionist version of East of Eden, but to center Cathy’s perspective and really try to understand what might make a person do the horrible things she does. (And she does some pretty horrible things.) To accomplish this, she needed an actor capable of breathing life into a particularly complex, often misunderstood woman.

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“It was really important to me not to warm her up or make excuses for her—to find softness and tenderness and humanity without changing the primary DNA of this person.”

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The show needed an Adam who exuded both strength and sensitivity, someone who could complement Pugh: “I was really looking for an actor who embodied, physically, a lot of masculinity, but had a softness inside of him.” She found him in Tony nominee Christopher Abbott—though she says Abbott at first wasn’t sure that she was offering him the right role. “He got on the phone with me and was like, ‘Don’t you mean Charles?’”

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Most intriguingly, Faist and Abbott felt to her like two sides of the same coin. Though there’s no moment in the series where the actors switch roles, True West–style, “I think our Adam could have played Charles and our Charles could have played Adam.” East of Eden is a story about binaries—and breaking free of them. “And actually, when we were casting Cal and Aron, I had all the actors read both parts, because it was really important to me that there was a sense of ‘this could have gone either way.’”

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“It wasn’t about wanting to put the only central nonwhite character in this book on some kind of pedestal,” she says. “But he’s such an engine in the plot and he’s such a fascinating character. I wanted to pare away what was distractingly racist and honor the humanitarian impulse that Steinbeck was having—but be able to go further with it than he went.”

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“I want people walking away from this talking about themselves, and their own families, and their own histories, and their loves and failures,” she says. “You want someone to wrestle with it the way that you wrestled with it.”

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full article

Yes this quote was in reference to him....

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“It wasn’t about wanting to put the only central nonwhite character in this book on some kind of pedestal,” she says. “But he’s such an engine in the plot and he’s such a fascinating character. I wanted to pare away what was distractingly racist and honor the humanitarian impulse that Steinbeck was having—but be able to go further with it than he went.”

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Him being left out of her grandfathers adaption seems like the only thing she didn't care for in her grandfathers adaption.

Hoon Lee was cast. Outside of Pugh as Cathy, he's probably my favorite casting. Seem's like he's going to be a big part of the show.

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7 episodes doesn't seem like enough. East of Eden takes place over like 50 years

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The South Korean version of East of Eden (2008) runs 56 episodes with the 2 families squabbling over several generations.