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 Well, it turns out you can be the proud owner of a copy of an unpublished, unmade screenplay by the great Terrence Malick.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.
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.
