Sundance kid

Family in tow, novelist and Coastline Pilot columnist Sherwood Kiraly is on his way to one of the biggest nights of his life. In Utah.

“It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said.

A film made of his novel, “Diminished Capacity,” will premiere at the Sundance Festival on Monday.

“I’m really proud of it,” Kiraly said.

The film stars Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda and Virginia Madsen.

Kiraly heard the news that the film was accepted into the prestigious festival in late November and immediately booked a place to stay in Park City.

The story, first written more than a decade ago, deals with a very rare baseball card, a high school sweetheart, memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

Oh, and it’s a comedy.

“It’s taken 12 years to get the movie done,” Kiraly said.

Names of different directors were kicked around as often as those of famous actors, from Robert Altman to Paul Newman.

Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company finally picked up the project; the company has launched the careers of actors such as Gary Sinise and John Malkovich; it is debuting “Diminished Capacity” through its newly formed Steppenwolf Films.

The process was jump-started last year at a table reading in New York that Kiraly attended. The film was soon picked up by indie production company Plum Pictures, which had just garnered an award for its 2007 feature, “Grace Be Gone,” and was looking for “the next big thing,” Kiraly said.

“Everything happened so fast after that,” he said. Despite having no plans to get it made at the beginning of 2006, the next thing Kiraly knew, actors like Alan Alda and Virginia Madsen were linked to the project.

“I’m glad that we finally did it this time around,” Kiraly said; not least of all because he has been given a very close hand in the film’s creation.

“This was the right combination,” he said. “This time, I got to do the screenplay. I remember asking, ‘Would I be the guy on this?’ [and] Terry said, ‘We’re not going to do it without you, dude.’”

The novel was almost never completed; after it was half-written, Kiraly said there wasn’t enough buzz about it to inspire him to continue.

But his wife Patti Jo told him to write it for her.

In addition, Kiraly didn’t visualize the story as a screenplay.

“It was a novel all the way,” he said.

But readers began to rumble about the book’s likelihood for film production, and Kiraly’s agent finally got it in the hands of Kinney.

Kiraly had been in talks to develop another one of his novels, “Big Babies,” into a film. Then came the writer’s strike; Kiraly said he won’t work on the script or the film project until it’s over, although he’s not a member of the guild.

Possible names linked to “Big Babies” include Val Kilmer and actor/director Adam Goldberg.

“Diminished Capacity” costar Broderick, who plays brain-injured protagonist Cooper Zerbs, has been linked to the script for two or three years, Kiraly said.

Tony Award-winning Steppenwolf co-founder Kinney, who directed the movie, asked Kiraly to be highly involved in the filming, an unusual protocol in feature filmmaking.

So the writer traveled back east with the cast and crew, performing occasional rewrites and mostly trying to stay out of everyone else’s way.

“That was scary at first,” Kiraly said of the rush rewrites.

But Kiraly was reassured by the presence of Alda.

“He’s a great writer himself,” Kiraly said of the actor. “I figured it must be good or he wouldn’t be in it.”

He was also impressed by the way the crew handled him.

“In movie terms, they were as kind to me as they could have been,” Kiraly said.

“They let the writing be my baby. That’s unheard-of, basically.”

The film was shot in locales ranging from a Red Hook bar to a home belonging to a relative of Pete Seger, Kiraly said.

The Hudson doubled as the Mississippi; a town in New Jersey morphed into small-town Missouri.

Kiraly spent his very limited downtime asleep in his temporary New York apartment; the filming was only punctuated by a short visit by his wife and daughter Katie, now a freshman at Dickinson college studying Arabic.

His daughter also had the chance to insert her own short line into the final script.

Katie had read many drafts of her father’s novels while growing up, and knew the material backward and forward, Kiraly said.

So it was natural for him to ask for her assistance in rewriting a scene while she was visiting her father on the set. She will be joining her parents in Park City for the debut.

Kiraly recalled that every time an actor, from star to minor character, finished shooting for their role, everybody on the set would applaud them.

On the last day of filming, at 6 a.m. following a long night, all remaining actors appeared together in an impromptu “curtain call.”

“It was very emotional,” Kiraly said. “It was a great feeling to know that we had actually done it.”

Now he finds himself out of town again — this time, anxiously awaiting the reactions of the cinema elite.

He will also be looking to see whether his own brief cameo in the film ended up on the cutting room floor.

“That’s going to be a freaky night,” he said.