On a trip to Los Angeles last year I met longtime reader Margaret de Larios who, as it turns out, turned our own Anne Marie of "A Year With Kate" fame on to the blog originally. Margaret wanted to sound off on a topic I was very intrigued by so here she is to talk about the mysteriously silent upcoming movie "Dark Places". Say hello! - Editor
In just under two months, Gone Girl will likely be taking cineplexes by storm. The movie's marketing team is not of a mind to let us forget it, slowly rolling out new posters and trailers as well as sending David Fincher out to stoke internet buzz by playing coy about a possible new ending.
But what about the other Gillian Flynn movie, Dark Places?
Because there is another Gillian Flynn movie. And a TV series in development. And a project with HBO. And an original screenplay. And two new impending novels. Gillian Flynn is about to be everywhere and I, for one, plan to welcome our new thriller overlord. Her work is creepy and uncomfortable and gripping in the best way. It also, significantly, happens to feature a wealth of meaty, nasty female roles. This could portend some long-needed mitigation of the True Detective Problem (or the Hannibal problem or the Breaking Bad problem or the-- well, you get the gist) and be a boon to lovers of actressing everywhere... as long as we finally get to see them produced.
Gone Girl is in the bag and Flynn's every development deal makes news, so whither Dark Places with Charlize Theron? [More...]
Its release date is supposedly set in November, which means we're long past due for a trailer. Adapted from the spellbindingly morbid 2009 novel (Flynn's second), Dark Places was cast and filmed fairly quietly, and although shooting wrapped a year ago we've heard nary a peep from the movie's PR folks.
Tye Sheridan and Chloe Moretz in "Dark Places"The cast is certainly buzzy enough. Charlize Theron stars as Libby Day, adult survivor of a gruesome massacre in rural Kansas who gets pulled into an amateur reinvestigation of the crime's mysterious circumstances. (Think Mavis Gary in Young Adult, but instead of just being spoiled she's been exposed to unspeakable horror and then left to grow up feral.) The supporting parts, themselves all tortured or stunted souls, are populated by critical favorites including Christina Hendricks, Corey Stoll, Tye Sheridan, Chloe Moretz, and Nicholas Hoult. Depending on how writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner plays his cards, there could be a major breakout performance from any member of the cast. He's a relatively unknown quantity, but he does have experience directing Oscar-winning leading ladies (Kristin Scott Thomas in Sarah's Key and Marion Cotillard in Pretty Things). Is Dark Places stuck doing the distribution limbo? Perhaps the production company is holding off on the hope that Gone Girl will be a smash, and they can then capitalize on the new cachet that "From the author of.." will bring. If twisted stories centered around deeply unlikeable women come fully into fashion, at least one other Flynn project stands to benefit.
It's recently been announced that Sharp Objects, the first of her three novels and the most skin-crawlingly creepy by far, will be developed as a series by Entertainment One Television with Marti Noxon on board as showrunner. At its core Sharp Objects is a small-town murder mystery, which suits the drama series format. The story follows a reporter who has to return to her hometown to cover the murder of two preteen girls after a stint in a psychiatric hospital, and has what Flynn calls a "moist, gothic" tone.
I'm going to tell you right now, it gets weird.
The three principal characters are deeply f***ed-up women. Noxon, responsible for some of the darkest arcs on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, should be right at home in this territory. If well-executed it has potential for all the gruesome twistiness of True Detective, with gender politics more in line with Top of the Lake. For the time being, though, it's just a glint in a producer's eye. All the hurdles of development and pilot season and series pickup are yet to be passed. Let's say a prayer to the development gods that these projects see the light of day.
Are you excited for Dark Places? For the Sharp Objects series, who would you like to see rip each other apart as a toxic mother-daughter pair?