Who will play this man?

Craig sent along a pointer to a showbiz roundup in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day. It begins by catching up with Olympia Dukakis, who's got five movies "in various stages of production" at the moment. But then we get to the interesting bit: At the Nantucket Film Festival this summer, Dukakis took part in a staged reading of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces - in part, perhaps, to prepare for her role in the film: "It's directed by 'this young kid,' as Dukakis calls 28-year-old David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls). Anne Meara is set to play the mom, and Dukakis is a relative. Dukakis says Philip Seymour Hoffman is the prime candidate for the lead."

Well. That would be something, wouldn't it. The film has been haunting Development Hell for some time. From a Daily Variety story dated May 17, 2001: "Two major companies [Miramax and Paramount] are fighting over a project that's been in development for eight years." So, for a solid decade now, various directors, producers and actors, including Steven Soderbergh, Drew Barrymore and Harold Ramis, have been attached and detached and reattached and detached again.

David Gordon Green? I like it. For one thing, he's told Movie Habit, "I've been obsessed with [the book] since I was sixteen." That's a good sign, for starters.

Philip Seymour Hoffman? He seems to be everyone's frontrunner for the role of Ignatius J. Reilly, definitely the favorite on the IMDb boards, though it does seem that Jack Black, John C. Reilly and Oliver Platt have their champions as well. The nightmare scenario: Will Ferrell. Of course, the prospect of Adam Sandler in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie didn't exactly thrill the pundits, either; still, Ignatius calls for a little more range and depth than Barry Egan. Here he is, described by the author who created him, from a page at Bohemian Ink that also includes Walker Percy's "Foreword" to the novel:

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

Back to David Gordon Green in Movie Habit: "[The film's] a character piece that could go the wrong way and become a cartoon of New Orleans and it's important to me to bring such an authenticity to the characters in this place, a sincerity to their humor and their sadness and everything. It's a big step forward in terms of a profile of a film I've never dealt with, so that'll [be] an education too and it may be beautiful and it may be stressful."

But he's still mum on who'll take the lead.

Posted by dwhudson at August 19, 2003 6:12 AM