At the beginning of this year we reported that novelist/ screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis (“American Psycho”) had been hired by Lionsgate to write a screenplay based on Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales’ coverage of artists Theresa Duncan and her partner Jeremy Blake, the East Village couple who mysteriously committed suicide last year.
Now the picture has a filmmaker in Gus Van Sant who has come on board to help realize the project, though according to Variety he’s only helping out in a writing capacity so far as he does have the teen emo drama, “Restless” on his plate currently.
Ellis’ script is based upon the intriguing and aforementioned Vanity Fair article, dubbed “The Golden Suicides,” that delves into the couples depressions, Romeo & Juliet-like passionate ties, and their involvement in Scientology, which conspiracy theorists believe had something to do with bringing Duncan to suicide.
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, “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.
Believing Scientologists were hounding and watching them, as Variety says, “the couple descended into a paranoid spiral when the artists developed a consuming belief that government and religious organizations were conspiring against them.” Their story to read on paper is quite tragic and heartbreaking. Duncan committed suicide in 2007 and then Blake, who found her on the floor of their bedroom, followed suit a week later, stripping naked and walked into the Atlantic Ocean until he drowned.
The Vanity Fair piece is a hell of an article and a fascinating, must-read. This is the type of film that Gus Van Sant seems perfect for, so we hope once “Restless” is shot and the script takes shape (probably revisions since Ellis has been writing presumably since January), he considers taking this on as a directorial project as well.