Who Will Help Us Buy The Unpublished Screenplay For Terrence Malick's 'The English-Speaker'?

Do you have a spare $495? Don’t need to spend it on the things that the rest of us do, like food, and rent, and Criterion Collection Blu-Rays? Well, it turns out you can be the proud owner of a copy of an unpublished, unmade screenplay by the great Terrence Malick. A helpful reader (thanks!) pointed us towards an item on eBay that appears to be called “The English-Speaker,” and dated 20 October 1992, credited to one “Terry Malick.”

And while you might question the authenticity of the particular script floating around for sale on eBay, but the project is very real, albeit an old one about profound mental illness.

An article in Vanity Fair (via Wikipedia) referred to the script, which was apparently written for the producers of “The Thin Red Line,” Robert Michael Gleiser and John Roberdeau, and a Variety article from 1992 refers to it as a project that Malick had been thinking about since before “Days of Heaven” (in fact, it was supposed to shoot before “The Thin Red Line”). Malick reportedly fell out with the producers after his second world war epic (which at one point had a five hour cut and almost starred Adrien Brody and John C. Reilly instead of relegating them to minor roles), which may help to explain why the project’s never seen the light of day (well, that and the fact that the director isn’t exactly prolific…).

A blog devoted to the director reported that the script was about the famous psychoanalysis patient Anna O, who was really an Austrian-Jewish feminist named Bertha Pappenheim. Following the death of her father, she became a patient of Josef Breuer, and was featured as a case study in his book “Studies on Hysteria,” co-written with Freud. Among her symptoms were “absences” — a change in personality, accompanied by “profoundly melancholy phantasies…sometimes characterized by poetic beauty.” She also suffered from language disorders, able only to understand German, but speaking English, French or Italian.

We’ve passed the hat round here at The Playlist in the hope that we might be able to place a bid, but all that most of us have in our pockets are knives and lint, so we’ve come up short. Hopefully, whoever does pick it up will somehow persuade Malick to actually make the thing… Oh and if you do happen to pool your resources and buy it, be sure to scan it and send it to your friendly neighborhood Playlist who tipped you off to its existence in the first place.

Update: That was fast. The ebay auction is over and the screenplay has been sold. Hook some Playlist brothers and sisters up.