There is a good reason Hollywood continually makes Animal House wannabes and avoids producing films that actually focus on academia. Kids prefer their college movies to be about the fun stuff. And so a movie like Old School grossed $75 million while another Luke Wilson comedy called Tenure currently lacks a distributor. The latter film may also be hilarious, as a satire of the tenure process, but if it doesn’t concentrate more on beer bongs and naked co-eds, it won’t attract as big an audience. And according to some scholars, it may not even resonate with them, because it couldn’t possibly be what the process is really like. Film blogger and associate professor Chuck Tryon was quoted about the film last year as saying, “my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
And evident by the scathing reviews from Sundance of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it appears another film about academia has failed to make a strong case for the subject matter. Too bad for the late David Foster Wallace, whose stories were adapted for the film, that Gus Van Sant wasn’t at the helm. A decade ago, in an interview with Van Sant, Wallace pretty much gushed that Good Will Hunting is the most accurate film about academia ever made. Do we agree with him? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of competition for such an honor. But in our attempt to recognize the ten best films about academia, Good Will Hunting doesn’t quite make the top spot.
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John Krasinski is best known for his role as Jim on NBC’s The Office, but he originally got into acting because he’d attended a table reading of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and he decided he wanted to stick with it when he realized how smart acting could be. He began pursuing the film rights to Brief Interviews, and at a suggestion from co-star Rainn Wilson he decided to direct it himself.
Cut to Sundance 2009, where his adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was in competition. Spout attended a small press conference with Krasinski at Sundance where he spoke about adapting Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories, his first time directing, and why he’s not ready to leave The Office.
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That rumor that David Foster Wallace had collaborated on a screenplay adaptation of his own massive novel, Infinite Jest within a year before his recent suicide? As we suspected, it’s turned out to be somewhat off the mark––but not completely without a grain of truth. Glenn Kenny, who worked with Wallace on three stories at Premiere (including the infamous David Lynch profile and a story on Terminator 2 which was eventually published elsewhere), made some calls and wrote in with his findings. The gist: there is an Infinite Jest screenplay, which Sam Jones was at one point attached to direct, but other than writing the novel on which it was based, Wallace had nothing to do with it. Full details after the jump.
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I’m wary of passing along a rumor involving the recently deceased, but I thought this would be of too much interest to too many people to pass up. Devin at CHUD says he has a source who claims that David Foster Wallace was working on adapting his epic, legendary novel Infinite Jest into a screenplay just before he died over the weekend of an apparent suicide. According to Devin, Wallace collaborated with writer Sam Jones (director of the Wilco doc I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) on an adaptation “as recently as last year.”
It’s probably worth noting that without Wallace around to refute it, any source could say anything, and even if this project did exist, there’s no guarantee that anything will come of it. Of course, as Devin points out, death sells, so I guess its possible that some exec might take it upon themselves to try to rush out a quickie version of a completely unfilmable novel in an attempt to tempt Wallace’s saddendened fans into the theater. If that does happen, we’ll be the first in line to fantasy cast Joelle Van Dyne, but as of this writing, Wallace’s sole IMDb credit is in association with John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and we imagine that’s the way it’ll stay.
Writer/novelist David Foster Wallace has reportedly been found dead of an apparent suicide. In 1996, Wallace wrote this Premiere Magazine story about David Lynch, which is widely considered (at least, by me and my friends) to be the greatest set visit story of all time. Wallace’s collection of short stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is the basis of the forthcoming feature directorial debut from actor John Krasinski. Wallce was 46. More details here and here.
