Last last year we heard that Paul Thomas Anderson, who hasn’t directed a film since There Will Be Blood, was developing an adaptation Thomas Pynchon‘s 2009 hippie-private-eye novel Inherent Vice. Rumors of Robert Downey Jr. leading circled, and now we have confirmation from The Hollywood Reporter that the film is looking to shoot this fall with the star.
This comes quickly after the news that that billionaire Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle boss Larry Ellison, was going to finance Vice, as well as PTA’s long-delayed scientology project The Master. That project has stalled with Philip Seymour Hoffman still attached, but Vice is looking to shoot first. Check out a synopsis of the Inherent Vice novel below.
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.
With a fall shoot, this is a free period for Downey, who dropped out of Sam Raimi‘s Oz, the Great and Powerful. The highly sought after actor is also shooting The Avengers this year, after recently wrapping Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.