Robert Downey Jr. Confirmed For Paul Thomas Anderson's INHERENT VICE
It's been confirmed that director Paul Thomas Anderson's next film project will be an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice, and that Robert Downey Jr. will star in it. The news comes from Showbiz411 who also says that Charlize Theron might end up joining the film production as well.
I'm a fan of Anderson's work, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out. He hoped this would be his next film, and it's cool that he's going to be able to do it. The story 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".
The Master didn't do very well at the box office, and apparently he's hoping that this will be a more successful film for him. An inside source says the author of the book only wants Anderson to make this movie, and that “it’s closer to Boogie Nights than any of his other films."
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 . . .