Black Hole

[MacGuffin]

David Fincher to Direct Black Hole
Source: Variety

Variety reports that David Fincher will direct Black Hole for Paramount Pictures. Alexandre Aja was previously attached to direct.

Based on Charles Burns' graphic novel, the project was set up at MTV Films but will now be developed at the parent studio. Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman were tapped to adapt the screenplay in March 2006.

This is how the book is described:

Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's not turning back.

As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.

And then the murders start.

As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.

To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin...

[picolas]

no he won't.

[polkablues]

no he won't.

Stop crushing my dreams.

[picolas]

Fincher started it.

[Gamblour.]

How in the fuck are the going to make this into a movie? I'm glad he's not going with Torso (another period film about a serial killer) as was rumored long ago, but it's hard to think of Black Hole as a movie, in terms of narrative especially.

[MacGuffin]

Neil Gaiman On Adapting Charles Burns' Graphic Novel 'Black Hole'
Source: MTV

Neil Gaiman doesn't just adapt his own work — he's just as ready and willing to take on someone else's comic or graphic novel and adapt it for the big screen.

For the past two years, Gaiman and Roger Avary (also known as the "Beowulf" writing team ) had been working to adapt Charles Burns' acclaimed graphic novel "Black Hole" — you know, the twelve-issue series where high school kids in the '70s get a sexually transmitted disease called "teen plague," which at first, has no known cause. Some only got a rash. Others became monsters and grew new body parts, like a tail or an extra mouth or webbing. It's like a mini-AIDS, with all the sexual-social outsider issues that entails but way more mutations.

Splat Packer Alexandre Aja ("The Hills Have Eyes," "Mirrors") was originally going to direct, but then David Fincher came aboard. Good for name recognition at the box office, not always so good for the writers working under him. "Once they got David Fincher on," Gaiman said, "David explained his process consisted of having over ten drafts, done over and over, and Roger and I were sort of asked if we wanted to, if we were interested in doing that. And we definitely weren't."

So Gaiman and Avary "sort of stood aside," he said. Fincher still has their last draft of the script, and he can work with it from there, but Gaiman doesn't know the status of the project any further than that.

"So we'll wait and see what happens," he said. "I just hope whatever happens, it's faithful to 'Black Hole.'"