Vulture reports that There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson wants to adapt famously reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon‘s 2009 hippie-private-eye novel Inherent Vice.
Inherent Vice follows pothead private detective Larry “Doc” Sportello as he wades through the druggy haze of 1969 Los Angeles. You can download the entertaining first chapter here. In Anderson’s hands, Inherent Vice might wind up feeling like a spiritual sequel (well, prequel) to 1973’s The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman‘s revisionist take on Philip Marlowe, recasting Raymond Chandler’s 1950’s gumshoe as a shambling, mumbling slacker with no friends.
They also indicate that Anderson’s agency, Creative Artists, is interested in Robert Downey Jr. as Doc Sportello, but nothing is official. He is a busy man in Hollywood and booked til November 2011.
It’s not too far-fetched to half-expect something a bit lighter in tone from PTA, since his follow-up to the L.A.-set epic Magnolia was his French New Wave-inspired near-comedy Punch-Drunk Love. Besides, Anderson was the back-up director on the ailing Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion, and both directors have a similar, sprawling approach to their material.
Since Anderson’s long-planned project The Master, based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his apprentice, was shelved in late September due to budget squabbles with Universal, the odds that the reclusive, secretive filmmaker would set something else up so fast were pretty slim, so this is good news. Anderson’s last film was 2007’s indisputably great There Will Be Blood, loosely based on legendary muckraker Sinclair Lewis’s novel Oil!
Does the pairing of Pynchon and Anderson sound like a good fit?