A few years ago the director Paul Thomas Anderson made a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice.”
It was so long and incomprehensible we called it “Incoherent Vice.”
Now there are reports that PTA’s new movie is based on Pynchon’s novel, “Vineland.” Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina King, and Sean Penn star in it.
According to Jeff Sneider’s The Insneider newsletter, the new title is “The Battle of Baktan Cross.”
A website called Lostcoastoutpost.com has been reporting on filming in Humboldt, California since at least February. They reprinted a press release from February from the The Humboldt-Del Norte Film Commission detailing what had been going on.
It read in part:
“That’s a wrap! The feature film known as the BC Project wrapped [locally] yesterdayafter 11 days of filming on the redwood coast.
“They are still wrapping out of some of the locations and area in general, so you might still see a truck or two, but filming is now complete,” expressed Cassandra Hesseltine, the Humboldt-Del Norte Film Commissioner.
“The film commission was first notified by the location team for the studio feature film in April of 2019. “We are honored to have been on their radar for all these years and for the project to finally come to fruition,” stated Hesseltine. The location department is usually our first point of contact and the last one to leave town.”
Will “Baktan Cross” be three hours, like “Inherent Vice”? Will it make as little sense? The hope is that PTA, who’s a fine director, will stay in the mode of his recent “Licorice Pizza,” which was enjoyably lighthearted, concise, and to the point.
We’ll see “Baktan Cross” in 2025, probably in Cannes or Venice.
Pynchon is 87 years old, and has lived like a recluse in New York for decades. He’s married to his literary agent, Melanie Jackson. Coincidentally, I saw them walking on the street the other day. But spotting them is like finding a white rhino in the field. I didn’t even think to take a picture.
Apart from these PTA filmed books, the author has other classics on his CV including “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “V,” and “The Crying of Lot 49.”
