Filing itself in the news folder marked “Eh?” is word that Jason Segel has signed up to play hip-lit maven David Foster Wallace. According to The Wrap’s sources, he’ll join Jesse Eisenberg in The End Of The Tour, a road-trip movie that follows an almost-famous Foster Wallace on an early book tour across America.
Eisenberg will play Rolling Stone scribe David Lipsky whose book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, will form the core of playwright Donald Margulies’s script. Expect envy and a rivalry of sorts to develop between the two scribes, as well as plenty of expounding on subjects rich and rare. Women, mental health and fame were three of the topics that occupied the pair into the wee small hours.
If you're wondering who the heck David Foster Wallace is, incidentally, he's one of the best writers of the late 20th century and wrote definitive pieces on Roger Federer, lobsters, John McCain and porn, alongside the monumental novel Infinite Jest, several other novels and short-story and essay collections. He also had a vocabulary about the size of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and a brain the size of Mars. So no pressure, Jason Segel!
Another Rolling Stone alumnus, James Ponsoldt, director of alcoholism drama Smashed and the as-yet unreleased (in the UK at least) The Spectacular Now, is taking the reins on this one. According to The Wrap, shooting is pencilled in for February or March next year.
David Kanter and Matt DeRoss are producing for Anonymous Content. They'll be hopeful that the army of loyalists (aka "howling fantods") of the recently-deceased writer - Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 – will come out in force to see this, curious at least to see if this is the first film in movie history to feature copious footnotes.