You want Eric Roberts in a movie? Just call him. Because seriously, look at his IMDB page—dude will take whatever comes his way and he’s got about fifty kajillion projects on the go. He doesn’t discriminate either. In the same year he popped up in “The Dark Knight” he also did a stint on “Entourage” and appeared in “Witless Protection” with Larry The Cable Guy. And yet even with all that, one part he’s played seems to have flown safely under the radar. Yep, he’s in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “Inherent Vice.”
“…a Paul Thomas Anderson film is coming out, and um, uh, I can’t talk about it, I can just say it’s coming out….,” he revealed on the Dr. Drew Podcast about one of his upcoming gigs. “…that was a great experience, and you know, and, and uh… and making movies these days is a lot like making instant coffee; it is fast and it is not particularly tasty. And uh… but working with him was like the old days. He shot on 35mm, and you got three or four takes. It was like wow. ‘Cause now you get one take. You might get two. But you get one take.” Of course there’s no word on his role or even if he’ll wind up in the final cut, but that’s hardly the most interesting PTA tidbit.
The dudes over at SplitSider currently have an old feature entitled The Lost Roles of Anchorman (picked up on by Cigarettes & Red Vines) which explores all the avenues “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” took before it finally arrived on the screen. And oddly enough, Paul Thomas Anderson himself was tangentially involved in at least getting the script off the ground.
“He was the reason why we wrote the script. ‘Cause he had read a script Adam [McKay] and I had written called ‘August Blowout‘ that he thought was really funny and it was stuck at a studio and they weren’t making it,” Will Ferrell said. “To his credit… very nice of him, [he] loved that script. He said, ‘Why aren’t you making this? What if I help you guys get something made? You just write whatever you want and I will be the producer.’ So, we wrote ‘Anchorman’ on spec. He was kind of the impetus to get it going. He went on to do other things. ‘Punch-Drunk Love.’ But he got the ball rolling for us.”
And that’s all for now, but you can thank PTA for helping, in a small way, Ron Burgundy to come into existence. Meanwhile, there are is no exact release date for “Inherent Vice,” but clearly surprises are still in store.
