Marking what is objectively the day’s best news, Deadline tells us Michael Almereyda will follow last year’s splendid Experimenter by adapting a holy grail of postmodern lit—BB Film Productions have practically started printing money. Slight jesting aside, it’s immensely exciting to hear he’ll script (and, one hopes, eventually direct) an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the deeply perceptive and comically skewed aspects of which may be a perfect fit for his cinematic stylings.
DeLillo is notoriously difficult to adapt, and White Noise is perhaps all the more challenging because it represents something of a perfect blend in its bone-dry humor, fine-tuned way of seeing our world, lack of a cohesive narrative—until a giant toxic cloud hangs over the central town for a number of pages; even that goes away with a good portion left—and lack of traditional conclusion. As prose, however, it’s spellbinding; whoever brings this to the screen must speak a fitting, if not outright equal, cinematic language.
Were Experimenter not among the most innovative biopics in recent years, Almereyda’s long bent towards the boundary-breaking—who else ever thought of shooting a one-hour feature in PixelVision?—marks a good start. I can only hope White Noise doesn’t fizzle out. But between this and BB Films’ involvement in Tesla, his screenplay concerning the inventor’s life, we might be seeing a new step in his unusual career.