Predictably, following the tragic news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide over the weekend, rumors are swirling about a movie version of Wallace’s thousand-page epic, Infinite Jest — some purporting that one may have already been in the works. Devin Faraci at Cinematic Happenings Under Development says he’s heard from sources that DFW was collaborating with Sam Jones, the director of Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, on an adaptation.
A blog post from two years ago has the Sam Jones rumor and tacks on the name of playwright Keith Bunin as a potential screenwriter and Jon Brion as the score’s composer, which sort of makes the whole thing sound like whole-cloth speculation. But BroadwayWorld.com, in an article from May of this year on Bunin’s recent theater work, says that Bunin was in fact working on an Infinite Jest screenplay. (Muddling things further is the fact that Curtis Armstrong — Booger from Revenge of the Nerds — supposedly sold a never-made screenplay adaptation of the book to HBO.) Could Infinite Jest: The Movie actually happen? Who knows, but we’d probably be first in line to see it.
