I Do What I Want, Yeah.

So, I'm going to go ahead and tell y'all about some movie news that I just got excited about, real quick*. I'm posting it here because I believe it keeps with the theme of art and creativity this blog purports to carry -- just, in a different medium. But mostly, I just like doing whatever I want to. And I'm sorry if that upsets you.

But dudes**, it was reported last month (a month ago, you say? timely, I know) that Oscar-winner screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (won for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and off-the-wall director Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are, Jackass 3D) may be reuniting for an upcoming film. This is cool because the pair first got noticed in Hollywood by collaborating on the insane, what-the-hell-am-i-watching, cult hit Being John Malkovich. However, cult hits don't typically get multiple Oscar nominations. Both Kaufman and Jonze were nominated for screenwriting and directing, respectively -- and I personally awarded Cameron Diaz best hair in any movie.

A couple years later, the duo collaborated again on Adaptation, which brought Kaufman another screenwriting nomination and included acting nominations for Meryl Streep, Nic Cage (aha!), and Chris Cooper won best supporting actor for taking out his front teeth and getting naked. It could easily be considered my favorite movie.

So, you can maybe see why I'm looking forward to another film out of these two. However, nobody seems to know much about it. Ah, entertainment news is fantastic, isn't it? Nothing has actually happened, but you can't stop us from writing and writing and writing about it anyways. What lovely gems of bullsh--t do you have for me, LA Times?

The pair are pitching a new movie. While the plot is being kept under tight wraps -- it's a pitch, so a script has yet to be written, and Kaufman movies are famously hard to describe in a few sentences anyway -- two people familiar with the project said it has been making the rounds to independent financiers in recent weeks.

Kaufman has been writing a script that he has called "Frank or Francis," according to several people familiar with it. The film, perceived as commercially tricky but also beloved, is a Hollywood satire in the form of a musical (!) and has an art-imitating-life conceit somewhat in the vein of "Adaptation." (The basic premise: a director embraced for broadly commercial hits resents his success and wants to be considered an auteur and artiste; one imagines it as a bizarre-o world version of Kaufman himself, who hasn't made any broadly commercial movies and has in fact been embraced as an auteur and artiste.)

Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, two dapper gentlemen

*turns out, not so quick
**as in, the universal "dude"