By “Now I know why you’re depressed,” my ninth grade math teacher said after he spotted me reading Orwell’s 1984 at my desk, making what some would deem an inappropriate joke of my excuse for a recent slate of absences from school. What his off-color pithiness failed to account for is that not only did the somber and pessimistic novel indeed nourish the bleakness of my adolescence then, but the mere matter of having read it (of my own initiative) at any point in my life now leads me to a reflexive protectiveness of it at the mere whisper of another adaptation, yielding a sense of impotent frustration that only hastens my daily descent into depressive lethargy and binge eating.
So it is with a heavy heart that I report that Imagine Entertainment’s forthcoming Nineteen Eighty-Four has contracted Noah Oppenheim as its screenwriter. Oppenheim, a television producer most notable for his time with NBC News, as well as co-creating Mad Money, has yet to script a fully realized film, although his adaptation of The Secret Life of Houdini is set for 2014 release with Gary Ross as director.
No other names have so far been courted, but one intriguing tidbit is that none other than Shepard Fairey, whose seminal street art certainly owes inspiration to the Orwell, was instrumental in some ambiguous way in getting the project green lit by Imagine and may wind up with a producer credit. I, for one, wouldn’t mind further involvement from Fairey. Having every scene dressed with Big Brother stencil portraits is one of the less offensive aesthetic themes the film could pursue.
[via Deadline]