Bret Easton Ellis Says Roger Avary Will Direct ‘Glamorama’ Next Year
The association between authorBret Easton Ellisand screenwriter/directorRoger Avarygoes back a decade. Avary directed a film version of the Ellis novelThe Rules of Attraction, released in 2002, and used footage shot for that film to create another movie,Glitterati, which is tangentially related toThe Rules of Attraction.
Glitteratihas never officially been released, and probably never will, which I’ll get into in a minute. But that film was intended as connective tissue betweenThe Rules of Attractionand the adaptation of another Ellis novel,Glamorama, which Avary has planned to write and direct for many years. Now Bret Easton Ellis says theGlamoramascript is done and will be directed by Avary next year.
First, the news. Last night, Ellis said viaTwitter,
Just finished reading Roger Avary’s adaptation of “Glamorama” which he will direct next year. Hilarious, horrific, sad. He’s a mad genius.
Does this mean we’ll actually seeGlamoramain 2013? I’m not holding my breath. The property has been in Avary’s hands since 2004, and we haven’t even mentioned it sinceMarch 2008. But Avary had a little bit of legal trouble from 2008 to 2010, and with that behind him perhaps he’ll be able to push this forward. The existence of a finished script that Ellis loves is a good sign, at least.
And then there’s the wholeGlitteratithing, which is worth getting into. That was a largely improvised film featuringKip Parduein hisThe Rules of Attractionrole of Victor Ward. (That same character is the lead inGlamorama.) The movie is a recap of Ward’s time in Europe, as mentioned inRules. Reportedly it basically consists of Purdue constantly being in character, hanging out with and seducing women who, as the story goes, were never told they’d be in a movie. Avary supposedly called the film “ethically questionable,” though I can’t find an online citation for that quote.
In a recent interview with theAV Club, however, Ellis said,
you’re able to’t really show Glitterati in public, it’s not possible. There are a lot of people who would be very upset. I don’t even know if they got permission from a lot of the people in it, which might be a big problem, why it’s only shown privately.
Doesn’t that just make you want to seeGlitteratimore, even if it might not be particularly good? Sure does for me.
Here’s a synopsis ofGlamorama:
Ellis’s (The Informers) bad trip through glitterary New York has everything his fans (and critics) have come to expect: graphic sex, designer drugs, rock ‘n’ roll allusions, splatterpunk violence and characters as deep as 8"x10" glossies. Protagonist Victor Ward, a “model-slash-loser,” is opening his own trendy Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and back-stabbing his partner. After some adventures in clubland, the plot takes a turn for the paranoid. Victor is recruited by a mysterious figure, F. Fred Palakon, to track down a former girlfriend gone missing in London. There he becomes unwillingly drawn into a terrorist group?run, like so much else in the novel, by a supermodel?that bombs fashionable hangouts, hotels and jetliners.
