Valley Roots

By: Daniel Salemme | March 11, 2011 | Film

There could be one, definitive reason why John C. Reilly’s wandering gambler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight seemed as lost as he was. He was clearly too far from The Valley.

Anderson—the son of San Fernando—undoubtedly flourishes on the coast. Even his Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood fared the golden So Cal glow, albeit on the cusp of the California Gold Rush and far from the still-life traffic of the 405.

After some hardly-throwaway projects considered for his next effort—including an adaptation of Rob Hansen’s novel Desperadoes and an original (and commercially controversial) religion-based story entitled The Master—his now four-year-running contemplation has seemed to finally hone in on a chosen project.

Inherent Vice, from novelist Thomas Pynchon, follows the ventures of private eye Doc Sportello on the heels of a murder investigation and chronic inebriation. With Robert Downey Jr. in the running to star, the adaptation would return Anderson to his 60s-circa Boogie Nights landscape in all of its immorally sun burnt glory—the inclusion of prosthetic genitalia, indeterminate.

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