I’m wary of passing along a rumor involving the recently deceased, but I thought this would be of too much interest to too many people to pass up. Devin at CHUD says he has a source who claims that David Foster Wallace was working on adapting his epic, legendary novel Infinite Jest into a screenplay just before he died over the weekend of an apparent suicide. According to Devin, Wallace collaborated with writer Sam Jones (director of the Wilco doc I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) on an adaptation “as recently as last year.”
It’s probably worth noting that without Wallace around to refute it, any source could say anything, and even if this project did exist, there’s no guarantee that anything will come of it. Of course, as Devin points out, death sells, so I guess its possible that some exec might take it upon themselves to try to rush out a quickie version of a completely unfilmable novel in an attempt to tempt Wallace’s saddendened fans into the theater. If that does happen, we’ll be the first in line to fantasy cast Joelle Van Dyne, but as of this writing, Wallace’s sole IMDb credit is in association with John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and we imagine that’s the way it’ll stay.
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