Last year it was announced that There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson was developing a big screen adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice. He went on to direct the great looking controversial film The Master instead. Now that he's finished with that project it looks like he's looking to get back to work on Inherent Vice, which he describes as being "like a Cheech and Chong movie. [Adapting Pychon's work is] just gonna be great and, hopefully, fun."
The story follows follows a character name Larry "Doc" Sportello, a private eye with a penchant for pot who wanders 1969 Los Angeles during the summer of love. In the story he helps an ex-girlfriend with an intriguingly complicated case that involves infidelity, mental institutions and policemen called "Bigfoot".
There's no word on when this movie will actually happen, but Anderson tells Empire, "Hopefully not long. I'd like to have a few years of being more productive. But we'll see." He goes on to say that this isn't going to be an easy movie to adapt saying, "There's so much. But it's fun too, because they're his words, and... it's like taking your dad's car for a ride, y'know?"
When the movie was first announced Robert Downey Jr. was wanted for the lead character. No word on if that's still the case, but I think He's be great in the role. Hopefully this ends up being Anderson's next film project because it's one I've been eagerly waiting for him to make!
Here's a description of the story:
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon— private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog
It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .