With an almost completely dead, holiday hungover RSS, I spent the morning leisurely slogging through this LA Times profile of 80s it-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Much of the story’s 3,000 words are devoted to defenses of Ellis’ literary reputation, most notably for our purposes from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who praises Ellis as “a much more radical writer than he seems.” The rest of it details the oft-adapted novelist’s own attempts to break into screenwriting.

Ellis’ published work has so far formed the basis of three released films: the gloriously trashy Less Than Zero, in which Robert Downey Jr. essentially plays a future version of himself; Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which broke with Ellis’ trademark moral passivity in order to turn the material into obvious satire; and Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction, which seemed to be kind of more about Roger Avery learning how to use Final Cut Pro than anything else. Somewhere along the way, Ellis apparently “realized he’s not very good at script doctoring” and started concentrating on crafting scripts from scratch. The first of these efforts to see the light of day will be the upcoming The Informers, for which Ellis adapted his own shot story collection in collaboration with Nicholas Jarecki. But to say that Ellis’ outlook on his new career is less than rosy would be an understatement. After the jump, an excerpt from the end of the article, in which Ellis semi-bitterly acknowledges that he’s in a “lost period.”

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United Hollywood passes along the news that, mere hours after making a side deal with the WGA that will allow them to legally employ writers, United Artists has made a tentative deal with Paul Haggis to adapt a children’s fantasy book series called Ranger’s Apprentice. United Artists was the first studio to make such a deal (although Lionsgate and the Weinsteins reportedly have similar pacts in the works), so I guess this makes Paul Haggis the first screenwriter to legally get a job in the midst of the strike.

It’s legal, but is it kosher? An interesting fight has broken out in the comments on the United Hollywood post. On the one hand, this looks like a victory for these WGA side deals: the first studio to put a pact together nabs a name brand screenwriter and puts him to work on a franchise film within a matter of hours. But the very quickness of the deal has some wondering: was Haggis doing more than picketing over the past ten weeks?

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• Giving credence to rumors that have been floating around for many weeks, IFC confirmed yesterday that they’re planning to move away from distributing moderate-budget festival acquisitions in order to concentrate more attention on their IFC FirstTake program. This can only be good news for VOD-loving indie film fans. FirstTake has brought some of the year’s best films to cable boxes, including Day Night Day Night, Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of it All, and current selection This is England; they already have plans to distribute highly-anticipated (by me, at least) festival holdovers such as Hannah Takes the Stairs and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Can you imagine what they could do if they tried harder?
• Fox has struck a deal with what appears to be some kind of unofficial union called the Writing Partners, designed to lure top screenwriters to the studio by promising that the scribes will earn money off the gross if the movies get made.  This seems to be more thinly-veiled strike hysteria: Fox is worried that the crunch to get pictures in the can over the next twelve months will result in a dearth of quality, so they’re doing whatever it takes to get confirmed hit makers (Mr and Mrs Smith scribe Simon Kinberg and Little Miss Sunshine Oscar winner Michael Arndt are among the Partners) on board while they can.
• Len Wiseman, fresh off of resurrecting the Die Hard franchise, is in talks to steer a remake of Escape From New York. Gerard Butler (better known as “that guy from 300“) is apparently lined up to play the Kurt Russell role.

I stumbled across this story via the FILMMAKER Mag blog: in a lengthy story for the Contra Costa Times, Mary F. Pols talks to a number of female filmmakers, from super-indie to mega-Hollywood, about working in a business that is still overwhelmingly run by dudes. There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, but an anecdote from actress/director Julie Delpy particularly caught my eye.

Delpy’s second feature film as writer/director, 2 Days in Paris, opens in the U.S. next month. Festival buzz has generally been positive, but no one who’s seen the thing can overlook the similarities between it and the film that marks Delpy’s greatest triumph as an actress, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Well, turns out, there’s a reason for that. After working for some of world cinema’s greatest directors and attending NYU film school, Delpy “had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics”–none of which she could find financing for. Then, as Pols tells it,

[A] friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to Before Sunset, the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, and her friend’s supposition was that financiers would feel “safe” with a project that seemed like Before Sunset.
The trick paid off. Delpy wrote 40 pages of a relationship farce set in Paris, which she then shopped around. She found financing for it in Germany. The result is 2 Days in Paris. [...]
“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”

Delpy goes on explain that she’d “sell out to direct a big action movie” in a heartbeat. Her lifelong dream, she says, is to make a film like Blade Runner. “But you need money to make Blade Runner.”

Ignoring, for a moment, that Delpy probably shouldn’t be whining about how the big boys won’t give her money to make a summer tentpole before her first real feature is even released, I’d be fascinated to see what kinds of scripts are lying dormant in other filmmakers’ drawers. Does Harmony Korine have a high school comedy that no one wants to pay for? Does Sofia Coppola secretly want to remake Raging Bull? And considering how many relatively nameless, style-less directors are handed “big action movies” these days, does demonstrable competence in a specific genre actually hurt more than it helps?