IV on Screen?

[rich]

someone's got ESP

Page to Screen: Thomas Pynchon on Film? and David Ellis's Newest Thriller
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 6/25/2009 7:40:00 AM

This week in Page to Screen—PW's weekly column tracking film rights
circulating and sold in Hollywood—CAA shops the new Thomas Pynchon,
and Stephen Moore takes out an Edgar winner's newest thriller.

After something of a lull in Hollywood, with fewer book manuscripts
circulating around town—it could have been a post-BEA malaise or the
unshaky afterglow of the William Morris-Endeavor merger—a number of
books started making the rounds this week. Though a rep from CAA would
not comment about it, we hear Bob Bookman at the agency is shopping
the film rights to Thomas Pynchon's August-dropping new novel from
Penguin, Inherent Vice. The notoriously reclusive Pynchon, whose
biggest flirtation with Hollywood was his pixelated cameo in The
Simpsons (complete with bag-over-head), has never had any of his
complex postmodern prose turned into a film, so who knows what the
fate of Vice will be in Tinseltown. The book, which bloggers started
chattering about back in November after some outlets, like the L.A.
Times, got hold of Penguin's digital jacket copy, is promised to be
leaner and less weighty than some of Pynchon's previous efforts. (It's
less than 400 pages, which is something for Pynchon, who's penned
1,000-plus-page tomes.) About a billionaire land developer in late
'60s L.A., per Penguin, the novel might be the author's least serious.
As Wired noted: "Inherent Vice sounds less like the fractal paranoia
of Gravity’s Rainbow and more like the deranged sunshine noir of The
Big Lebowski." Certainly Lebowski might sit better with execs than
Gravity's Rainbow, right?