Down below is a article from thebookstandard.com about trying to get "Confederacy of Dunces"
to the movie screen. Now since Hollywood will not cast John McConell then I say cast SETH ROGEN. He is at the correct age and body type!
Now the movie should be made. The question is who will roll the dice and make the movie. This movie no matter what HOLLYWOOD says will be a hit. They should release the movie first just in New Orleans for 2 weeks (at the PRYTANIA). The ticket sales alone from New Orleans will make this movie a hit!
FROM http://www.thebookstandard.com/
On March 26, 1969, a young man named John Kennedy Toole connected a hose to his car's exhaust pipe, locked himself in and committed suicide. It is impossible to fathom why a person takes his or her own life, but this much is certain; Toole was despondent about his career as a writer, his unpublished novel had been rejected year in, year out, and the future seemed bleak — which makes the subsequent success of "A Confederacy of Dunces" all the more dazzling.
Years after Toole's death, his mother gave the manuscript to writer Walker Percy, who passed it on to the Louisiana State University Press. In 1980, the LSUP printed about 800 copies of the book's first edition, which took off to become a best seller and win its author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Before the LSUP even printed "Confederacy," the manuscript had found its way into the hands of Scott Kramer, then a 19-year-old executive at 20th Century Fox. Kramer had written to the publisher about an entirely different matter — requesting a botany book for his mother — but became its sole contact in Hollywood. When "Confederacy" was in galleys, the LSUP sent it to Kramer on the off chance that he might be interested.
Thus began an extraordinary 25-year journey through which "Confederacy" has dominated Kramer's life and become a Hollywood legend. He is still working on the project but admits that it has given him cause to reflect.
"I am certainly not looking for projects to become as emotionally involved with as 'Confederacy,'" Kramer quips. "But when you have put so much time into something, it is hard to give it up."
During the time Kramer has worked on "Confederacy," major names such as Stephen Fry, Harold Ramis, Scott Rudin and Steven Soderbergh have come and gone, and millions of dollars in development costs have accrued — but the project has not yet reached the screen. Its story is emblematic of the problems many major books face as they navigate Hollywood's largely nonliterary terrain
."It is a very different medium, and it requires very different things," says screenwriter Stephen Schiff, who has adapted novels including Vladimir Nabakov's "Lolita" and Stephen L. Carter's "The Emperor of Ocean Park."
Many observers believe that movie studios are ill-equipped to handle complicated stories with nonformulaic themes, but Schiff's point of view is relatively unconventional."
In some ways, producers and studios are more exacting than book editors often are," he says. "In the book world, you can get by with a lot of fairly slack stuff, especially if you have written best sellers. If you are a brand name, you can write some fairly shoddy stuff, and no editors will raise a voice — whereas by the time (the book) gets to the screen, you have had these squadrons of people checking every aspect of the plot and characters."
Those squadrons have favored books as a key source of feature film making since the beginning of cinema, and they frequently hire New York-based scouts to stay on top of the publishing world — from producer David O. Selznick, who optioned Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" manuscript, to Columbia Pictures, which recently purchased rights to "The Da Vinci Code" and other Dan Brown novels for a reported $6 million.
Warner Bros. Pictures has employed Maria Campbell, a highly regarded scout who previously worked for DreamWorks and has reeled in such works as "Emperor" and Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," often before their worldwide publishing deals have been signed and sealed. Warners' belief in books as source material was justified by the Harry Potter films, the studio's most significant recent franchise.Although J.K. Rowling's Potter books came to the screen relatively quickly, literary works often take years to develop.
Michael Douglas devoted much of his early career to getting Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" off the ground after his father failed to do so, and producer Wendy Finerman spent the better part of a decade struggling to mount Winston Groom's "Forrest Gump."
Huge sums of money have been poured into literary film projects, complicating their futures when studios put them in turnaround. In 1996, Touchstone Pictures purchased rights to the Michael Crichton best seller "Airframe" for $8 million-$10 million; the studio then spent several million dollars more, hiring top names such as Frank Pierson and John McTiernan to develop the screenplay, before finally putting the project in deep freeze.
Every Hollywood studio has purchased dozens of expensive books that have never made it to the screen. Warners owned rights to Donna Tartt's 1992 novel "The Secret History" for years before Miramax took it over, only to drop the project when Gwyneth Paltrow wanted her brother Jake to direct. Even J.R.R. Tolkien's epic "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy nearly died before New Line agreed to pay Miramax $11.5 million in turnaround costs.
Perhaps because of such costs, studios began to retrench from book-buying during the late 1990s. Ron Bernstein, a veteran ICM agent who specializes in selling literary works to the film industry, says the new media now dominating pop culture have siphoned money away from books."
There was a period of time in the mid-'90s when anything that wasn't nailed down got bought, but that is no longer the case," he says. "Now, there are enormous competitors to books: You can buy a toy or a game or remake a TV show."
But other observers believe that studios are returning to books, with recent large-scale purchases including "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," a 1986 Patrick Suskind novel that centers on an 18th century human gargoyle who dreams of creating the perfect scent. Producer Bernd Eichinger is working on the project after paying $5 million-$10 million for its film rights.
Such vast expenditures come with enormous risks, especially because a winning book does not guarantee a winning film.
"Some books have extremely complicated story lines that are very difficult to translate into dramatic scenes," Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler says. "A lot of them are internal or cerebral — that's one of the things I look (to avoid) when I am making a decision on whether to obtain material."
I have fallen into that trap myself," she adds. "Wally Lamb's 'I Know This Much Is True' has taken a long time, (and) that's because the book was 900 pages."
After several years in development with Jim Sheridan initially attached to direct, the "True" adaptation is approaching a start date with helmer Gina Prince-Bythewood.
Kevin McCormick, an executive vp at Warners — which has spent years developing books like the 2004 international hit film "A Very Long Engagement," based on a Sebastien Japrisot novel — says studio executives should recognize that the source of a book's appeal might also be what makes it difficult to adapt."
From our perspective, when we buy a book, we are buying not just a story but a voice," he says. "It is not just an idea. So often, you are challenged by: How do you adapt that voice?"
When studios answer that question, McCormick adds, the result frequently is "richer than when you get a screenplay; it is a richer piece of raw material to work with — and therefore harder."
Large investments of time and money kill many literary film projects, often because they depend on studios having stable regimes that can commit to years of development. And even when such stability exists, what made a book appear commercially viable can change.Such is perhaps the case with Caleb Carr's acclaimed 1994 novel "The Alienist," which for several years was developed at Paramount, at one point with Philip Kaufman attached to direct. A project insider believes that the book's tale, which centers on an 1896 New York police psychologist on the trail of a serial killer who is murdering transvestite-boy prostitutes, is too risqué for today's filmmakers.
Similarly, the red-hot frenzy surrounding D.M. Thomas' "The White Hotel" — which centers on a young woman who recounts a violent sexual fantasy while being analyzed by Sigmund Freud — has evaporated since the novel was published in 1981, eliminating the audience base on which producers count when buying a best seller.
The story behind Thomas' attempts to bring "Hotel" to the screen reads like something from a bad movie.
After his novel was published, the British writer took meeting after meeting with the likes of Barbra Streisand and producer Keith Barish before Robert Michael Geisler and John Roberdeau, producing partners with a tangled legal history, entered the picture.Geisler and Roberdeau hired Thomas to craft a screenplay for "Hotel," then had his script rewritten by historian Charles Mee. Turned down by Terrence Malick, the producers approached Bernardo Bertolucci, who stayed on the project for a while — only to be replaced by David Lynch. Lynch attached his then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini to star, and a new writer, Dennis Potter, soon was onboard.
One can only imagine what a Lynch/Potter collaboration would have looked like, but Lynch's private life got in the way: When he and Rossellini parted ways, so did the director and "Hotel." Years later, following Potter's 1994 death, a staged reading of his screenplay took place in New York — but still the money never came through to shoot the film.
Other directors then came and went, including Hector Babenco, David Cronenberg and Emir Kusturica (the latter dropped out because he was so enraged when the United States bombed Belgrade, Yugoslavia, that he refused to make a movie for American producers). Stars such as Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman also were involved briefly, and the producers approached dozens of other filmmakers including (improbably) Woody Allen and (less improbably) Pedro Almodóvar.
Geisler and Roberdeau, meanwhile, were wrestling their own demons — and following lawsuit after lawsuit by disgruntled Hollywood collaborators, they eventually vanished from the scene. (Geisler could not be reached for comment for this report, and Roberdeau passed away in 2002.)
As Thomas notes in a lengthy article about the project, the producers' finances crumbled: They gave up their Greenwich Village apartment and had to "move permanently into a hotel, certainly not a white one."(Barry Goldin, a lawyer connected to Thomas, says the rights are now clear, that Roberdeau and Geisler are no longer connected to the project, and that another producer, whom he declined to name, has optioned the book.)
Thomas' novel is not alone in its development-hell experience, but perhaps no project's history is as tortuous as that of "Confederacy." After Kramer optioned the book in May 1980, a friend who had joined Johnny Carson's newly formed production company began to develop it."The deal was done in 1981 after the book won the Pulitzer," Kramer says. "It had the cachet of being an 'important' novel, and 'important' novels don't become great movies."
When Wally Wolf left Carson to form his own company, he took "Confederacy" with him. No script was in place, but there was interest from top-notch talent including director Mike Nichols. Writer Buck Henry also was intrigued and hoped to direct."
From very early on, it was very popular with the talent in town — but not necessarily with the financiers," Kramer says.That changed when Richard Pryor and John Belushi became attached to star, but just when the film looked like a go, Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982 — and Kramer had to start all over "Confedaracy."
The movie hit a roadblock when Wolf sold its rights to financier John Langdon, but Langdon and Kramer subsequently joined forces. Soderbergh soon became interested in the film because he, like Toole, hailed from Louisiana.
Soderbergh joined Kramer in developing the material, but "Confederacy" still had not been shot by the early 1990s. Fox, with a new production regime headed by Rudin, then bought the book, and writers came and went: Mary Beth Henley wrote one draft, and Ramis supervised another. (Meanwhile, Soderbergh's star burned bright and faded as he went from 1989's "sex, lies, and videotape" to 1997's "Schizopolis.")New Line then became interested but would not commit, and Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing wanted to obtain the project for Rudin, who had segued into a producer role. Paramount eventually struck a deal and began to develop "Confederacy."
But Soderbergh and Rudin had different notions of how to make the movie, and when Rudin moved ahead on his own — hiring Fry to write a script — Kramer and Soderbergh sued. That lawsuit stalled the film for several years before Miramax optioned the book from Paramount.By then, Soderbergh's interest in directing "Confederacy" had waned, and he and Kramer attached David Gordon Green, in turn bringing aboard such talent as Drew Barrymore, Mos Def and Will Ferrell. The movie seemed set to go, but precisely then, Miramax's relationship with parent the Walt Disney Co. began to flounder.
Stuck between Harvey Weinstein's passion and Michael Eisner's wallet, "Confederacy" froze until Miramax's option expired in January 2004 and the book reverted to Paramount."Projects that are not genre films or aimed at specific audiences are hard to get financed," Kramer says.
"On top of that, because this book is so well-known, there have been wrestling matches going on between a lot of people who have tried to attach themselves, and that doesn't necessarily help."Kramer hopes to lock in a new financing deal soon and says the key players — Soderbergh, Green, Barrymore and Mos Def — remain attached. But his office answering machine sounds sadly prophetic in declaring, "If you are calling regarding 'Confederacy of Dunces,' that project is now on indefinite hold."
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