Have Angelina Jolie and James Franco joined “The Golden Suicides”? The project was written by iconic ’80s author Bret Easton Ellis and then later, Portland-based indie filmmaker Gus Van Sant was brought on board to help with the screenplay.
The rumor, if you can even call it that, was first picked up by CinemaTeaser in France. However, it all starts with Easton Ellis himself, who wrote over Twitter, “Keep looking at the script…Angelina and Franco for Theresa and Jeremy?…It doesn’t matter…I wrote it for them anyway…I just spaced…”
As Premiere speculates, is Easton Ellis hinting at something he knows is in the works? Doubtful. Screenwriters often write for certain actors in mind, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get them. Then again, it is a fascinating story and the two could eventually be interested, but it feels like early days and Easton Ellis says he just finished the screenplay.
There’s no mention of Gus Van Sant, which makes sense right now. When would he have had time to collaborate on this script or even take pass at a draft? In the fall the director was in pre-production for his new surreal and angsty teen film, “Restless” (though it’s actually untitled at the moment), in December he shot the film in Portland and surely in the new year the production wrapped and Van Sant moved on to editing and post-production.
Our guess is Van Sant hasn’t had a moment to look at it, begging two scenarios: 1) Easton Ellis is done with his draft and will be submitting it, but it will be months before Van Sant can even look at it, or 2) Easton Ellis is now simply writing it on his own? We’re betting on the former.
So back to “Golden Suicides.” In early 2009, Easton Ellis was hired by Lionsgate to write a screenplay based on Nancy Jo Sales’ riveting Vanity Fair article about the death of artists Theresa Duncan and her partner Jeremy Blake — the East Village couple who mysteriously committed suicide last year.
Their story is a bizarre, tragic one, full of conspiracy theories and mystery and if you’re at all intrigued we highly recommend reading the aforementioned VF article.
Duncan and Blake were well-known downtown L.A. and New York artists, Blake being particularly known in music film circles for having contributed digital paintings to the cover of Beck‘s Sea Change and the stylized transition scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch Drunk Love.” Beck, who was a friend of the couple, is also strangely tied to this tale (probably more so than he would like publicly) because he was allegedly almost involved in a beloved Duncan film project called, “Alice Underground,” that Beck denied ever having discussions about, but others dug up interviews where the musicians talked about the film explicitly and suggested his denials were flat-out lies.
Then Scientology theories started popping up as well — the couple alleged Scientologist were harassing and stalking them — and the story, a modern-day, Romeo & Juliet-like tragedy, became stranger and stranger.
Van Sant had never signed on for anything other than to help pen the script; whether he would direct at all was speculation by pretty much every film outlet out there, including ours. Truthfully though, we would love him to direct this film. It feels and sounds like it would have the ambiguous and distanced tone of his experimental tetralogy —”Elephant,” “Gerry,” “Paranoid Park” and in particular, the melancholy and quiet, “Last Days.”
Some might suggest that this project is why Angelina Jolie allegedly turned down Alfonso Cuarón’s new sci-fi thriller, “Gravity,” but we don’t buy that for a second. The timing on the two projects are in two stratospheres. Stay tuned for more, but don’t expect any concrete news for awhile.
