Per Empire:

Empire's Damon Wise is currently at the Venice Film Festival, and it's there that he spoke to Paul Thomas Anderson about his latest film, The Master, as well as his next project, Inherent Vice.

Based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, it's a 1970s Californian detective story that sees a stoner private eye called Larry "Doc" Sportello helping a former lover with an intriguing and ever-so-complicated, shaggy-dog-story of a case involving infidelity, mental institutions and policemen called "Bigfoot".

Anderson describes it as being "like a Cheech and Chong movie. [Adapting Pychon's work is] just gonna be great and, hopefully, fun."

RDJ has been attached to the project for over a year. I think with PTA's involvement he's going to star in this.

Sounds like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang Pt. 2. Count me in!

glad to see he's going to follow through and make this!

Bring it.

Interested to see Anderson tackle Pynchon, who I've always considered an unfilmable author (though I still haven't read Inherent Vice.)

Brings The Big Lebowski to mind for me.

HA! Awesome! I can't wait!

Hopefully it doesn't take 5 years to come out?

On the upside, Oil! by Upton Sinclair was once widely considered an unfilmable novel. But that didn't seem to stop PTA from making an excellent film. At least in this posters humble opinion.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-09-...ster-s-master/

I haven't read "Oil!" yet, but didn't PTA state that he basically only adapted the first 100 pages of the book and just went with original material for the other parts of the film?

The book is a very easy read and set almost exclusively around metropolitan LA. So I could see him filiming it quite quickly.

Brings The Long Goodbye to mind.

I'm really surprised to see a Pynchon novel being filmed.

Have you not read it? It's the least "Pynchon-esque" of his novels; a simple detective story. It's also the worst. Generic in every way.

Not yet, no.

It's hard to imagine it being his worst, though. Mason & Dixon burned me out on reading for a long time.

I'm more surprised that he's letting someone adapt one of his novels. He seems like he'd be the kind of writer who wouldn't let Hollywood touch his work.

Brings Inherent Vice to mind.

While that's great news, I hope it's in a supporting role. I was really looking forward to seeing what PTA could do with Robert Downey, Jr. in the lead role.

Both of them would be fucking awesome.

No. I believe RDJ is out.

^ that's confirmed, Joaquin Phoenix is now the lead. Mod update the thread title please?

Damn.

I read this book about five years ago and envisioned Woody Harrelson.

I don't think losing RDJ is a big loss. We've seen him play parts like this before. I know he is good at it. But I am much more interested in seeing Joaquin try something so different from what he has been doing.