What's Next For Gus Van Sant?

As usual, it looks like Gus Van Sant has a full slate of films planned for the next couple years. What's less clear is which films he'll actually get around to making. While his long-rumored adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test -- scripted by Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black -- would seem like a logical next step (and Van Sant Twittered that it would be his next film back in April), it looks like it has been back-burnered in favor of two more dark, typically Van Santian dramas involving troubled young people.

The first of these projects to shoot appears to be Restless, a very Harold and Maude-sounding spec script about a young man who spends his time hanging out at funerals. This project reunites Van Sant with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Entertaintment for the first time since Van Sant's bizarro Psycho experiment in 1998. Apparently, first time screenwriter Jason Lew was a classmate of Bryce Dallas Howard at New York University and she brought his script -- which, like Harold and Maude, was originally written as a play -- to her pals at Imagine. The plan is to shoot in Van Sant's native Oregon for about $15 million with Alice in Wonderland star Mia Wasikowska playing one of the leads.

The other project that Van Sant appears to be working on is an adaptation of a Vanity Fair article entitled "The Golden Suicides." This is the bizarre true story of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake's 2007 double suicide. As you may recall, Blake was the artist who designed those memorably psychedelic transitions in Punch-Drunk Love and Duncan was his artist/filmmaker/writer girlfriend of many years. This haunting tale of talented people in premature decline sounds like a direct descendent of Van Sant's other truth-inspired suicide dramas Elephant and Last Days. Here's a brief overview from the Vanity Fair article, though I highly recommend reading the whole thing:

" 'The lovely Theresa' was Theresa Duncan, a writer, filmmaker, computer-game creator, and Blake’s girlfriend of 12 years. He had found her lifeless body on July 10, in the rectory of St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, where the couple had been renting an apartment. There was a bowl full of Benadryl pills, a bottle of Tylenol PM, and a champagne glass on the nightstand. There was a note saying, 'I love all of you.' Duncan was 40. The last post on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, was a quote from author Reynolds Price about the human need for storytelling and the impossibility of surviving in silence.

"No one who spoke at Blake’s memorial service that evening at the Corcoran said anything about Theresa Duncan. Almost no one mentioned her name. (It happened to be her birthday, October 26.) No one talked about the dark stories and wild speculation that had emerged after news of the couple’s 'double suicide' hit the media. There had been reports they had become 'paranoid,' obsessed with conspiracy theories, believing they were being harassed by Scientologists. The Internet filled up with conjecture about government plots and murder. Something about their story seemed to capture the modern imagination, if only because no one knew exactly why two such accomplished and attractive people had chosen to make their exit."

Intriguingly, this project is already enveloped in some minor controversy, as the article's author Nancy Jo Sales was once married to Frank Morales, a rampant conspiracy theorist who some other conspiracy theorists suspect might have had a role in Duncan's death (so many conspiracy theories, so little time). Van Sant was confronted with a similar problem on Last Days, where he chose to deal with this by a) creating a fictionalized version of his reality-based protagonist and b) leaving the moment of this character's death offscreen. It's hard to say whether this was a conspiracy-savvy or simply aesthetic choice, but whatever the motive, Van Sant covered-his-bases.

At this point, Van Sant is only attached to write the script for The Golden Suicides, but it looks like he's collaborating with notorious (and underrated) novelist Brett Easton Ellis. This project sounds like a perfect fit for both, almost distressingly so. Van Sant has already dealt extensively with issues of celebrity and premature death, but let's face it, he's really good at it. Plus, this story's combination of conspiracy theories, Scientology paranoia, art world backstabbing and an out-of-left-field double suicide sounds like a recipe for fascinating cinema. Here's hoping Van Sant finds time to make it. -- Jonathan Doyle