I’m often in touch with New Orleans filmmaker, documentarian and screenwriter Dave DuBos so I’ve no excuse for missing Mike Fleming‘s 2.8 Deadline story about DuBos’ forthcoming film version of Butterly in the Typewriter, based on Cory MacLauchlin’s biography of “Confederacy of Dunces” author John Kennedy Toole.
DuBos wrote the screenplay and will direct the New Orleans-set film starting in May.
Thomas Mann (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Kong: Skull Island) will soon begin inhaling pasta, ice cream and cheeseburgers to play the late Toole, who attained Victor Buono-like proportions before offing himself at age 31.
(l. to r.)
Butterly in the Typewriter costars Susan Sarandon, Thomas Mann, Diane Kruger.
Susan Sarandon will play Toole’s mom; Diane Kruger will also star.
I love the notion of a butterfly in a typewriter — that darting, dancing, elusive thing that you’re trying to capture when you write. It’s from an unpublished O’Toole poem called “The Arbiter.”
As Dubos’s film is not an adaptation of “A Confederacy of Dunces” and was written about two years ago, the following HE article, posted on 11.16.12, doesn’t apply:
“Any widely admired screenplay that has not been filmed over the period of several years (like, for instance, the various efforts at adapting John Kennedy Toole‘s A Confederacy of Dunces) is either doomed to stay on the sidelines for eternity or it won’t pan out if it finally does get made. And the reason is that oft-referenced rule of creative potency.