

He tried a rather unorthodox strategy in preparing Pynchon’s inscrutable prose for the silver screen, going sentence by sentence and transcribing the whole novel into a raw script form, from which he sculpted it into a manageable shape. Anderson drafted the Inherent Vice script while simultaneously finalizing his The Master script.The film goes into limited release December 12 (presumably so that it may slip into awards-season eligibility territory) and enters wide release January 9.Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, and Martin Short will round out the cast. Indie-folk songstress Joanna Newsom will appear as Doc’s hippie acquaintance Sortilège.


Rumors have circulated that the notoriously camera-shy Pynchon will make a cameo, though Anderson remains tight-lipped.

This marks the first collaboration between Anderson and his domestic partner Maya Rudolph, who will play Petunia Leeway, Doc’s receptionist, who’s described in the novel as “a stunner in a starched cap.” Katherine Waterston (daughter of Sam) plays Fay, Josh Brolin rocks a flat-top of “Flintstone proportions” as Bigfoot, Owen Wilson takes up Coy’s sax, and the great Eric Roberts plays Mickey. He reunites with The Master star Joaquin Phoenix for the robustly mutton-chopped Doc. Anderson has assembled a formidable cast to undertake Pynchon’s cast of colorful characters.Also figuring prominently into the plot is the Golden Fang, the significance of which remains shrouded in mystery throughout the novel. Doc will run afoul of a number of oddball characters, such as surf-rock saxman Coy Harlingen, meathead cop Bigfoot Bjornsen, unsavory land tycoon Mickey Wolfmann, and a host of other weirdos (many of them, like Doc, proponents of recreational drug use). His hunt for clues sends him on a digressive odyssey through the seedier parts of a sunny, smoky SoCal. When Doc’s flower-child ex-girlfriend Fay Hepworth comes a-calling after her boyfriend vanishes, the “gum-sandal” detective takes the case. The film tracks Doc Sportello’s movements around the fictitious town of Gordita Beach, CA.The Dissolve’s constantly stoned news writers did some sleuthing of our own around the wilds of the Internet, and we’ve assembled the dossier below on all that is known about Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which appears to be the most hotly anticipated release remaining on the docket this year. Inherent Vice follows constantly stoned detective Doc Sportello as he collects clues around the wilds of Southern California to get to the bottom of the disappearance of his ex’s new squeeze. Mercifully, today’s Anderson profile in the New York Times provided the masses with a handful of new details for us to savor until the film hits theaters. As such, hungry film lovers have snapped up production details on the director’s upcoming Inherent Vice like rabid dogs do scraps, our ravenous appetites only teased and inflamed by the tidbits that have leaked prior to the film’s December 12 release. Over his six films, Anderson has gradually built a reputation as one of American cinema’s new masters, with no low points in his small filmography.
INHERENT VICE PANCAKES MOVIE
When that movie is the first attempt at adapting cult novelist/eccentric recluse Thomas Pynchon’s writing for the screen, it’s hard to keep from frothing at the mouth. It’s easy for cinephiles to get worked up when Paul Thomas Anderson announces he’s making a new movie.
