Great news for fans of smartass indie comics: Daniel Clowes' scathing and hilarious Wilson is heading for Hollywood, helmed by director Alexander Payne.
The deal, as reported by Deadline Hollywood, sounds like a marriage made in snarky heaven.
Director Payne's subversive cult classics like Citizen Ruth and Election mercilessly hazed do-gooders and derelicts dabbling in sex, drugs, politics and media. Even his midlife crises like About Schmidt and Sideways were filled with cranks, winos and idiot savants.
Adapting Clowes' graphic novel, about a sad-sack heckler named Wilson who continually tries to connect with a humanity he really abhors, for the silver screen should be a cinch.
Better yet, Payne's Wilson could top off a hat trick of cinema winners based on Clowes' brilliant comics. The last two – Ghost World and Art School Confidential – were both moving gut-busters. They were also breakouts for future Hollywood heavyweights like Scarlett Johansson and cult heroes like The Middleman himself, Matt Keeslar. The mind reels at who Payne and Clowes might choose to inhabit Wilson's pathetic frame, but Bill Murray definitely comes to mind.
Clowes will adapt the film, a project that will increase a hefty development workload that includes adaptations of his wry sci-fi comic The Death Ray for Jack Black, Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time and an untitled screenplay about the three Mississippi dudes who assembled a shot-for-shot DIY remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Whoever said Clowes was boring knows nothing of the term. (Nor of Clowes' mournful comic David Boring, for that matter.) The Oscar-nominated writer is a shy supernova deserving our full attention.
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