Gloomy Gus

It’s been only four years since the last film in his Death Trilogy, but Gus Van Sant is already journeying back to the land of the dead. Variety reports that the director will be teaming up with Bret Easton Ellis on a screenplay about the lives and 2007 double suicide of writer and video-game artist Theresa Duncan and digital painter Jeremy Blake (whose kaleidoscopic works were incorporated into Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love). They will adapt their story from Nancy Jo Sales’s Vanity Fair article “The Golden Suicides,” which asserts that the lovers’ downward spiral was partly the result of their paranoia that they were being targeted by agents of the Church of Scientology. The film will be a coproduction of PalmStar Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams, and K5 Film. Van Sant has not committed to directing the film himself.