Sam Rockwell might take on a perfectly suited role of ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues and Scarlett Johansson will play a specialist in suds and the nightlife in a project that is based on an original story by novelist Jim Thompson and the great Stanley Kubrick. The Iron Man 2 mentioned duo are the first signs of life in a while for this project, we can now suppose that commercials director Chris Palmer is edging closer to an eventual start date on Lunatic At Large. The last piece of news on this romance on the run set in the mid 50’s project dates back to 2007, so we’ll have a lot more confirming to do on whose might still be involved with the project.
Kubrick commissioned the noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson, with whom he had worked on “The Killing” and then on 1957’s “Paths of Glory” to write the screenplay. If we have someone to thank for bringing this project to the forefront, its Kubrick’s own lineage who is shepherding the project. Rockwell would take on the role of Johnnie Sheppard while Johansson would play Joyce. At some point after the meet, there’s a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge. The great set piece is a nighttime carnival sequence in which Joyce, lost and afraid, wanders among the tents and encounters a sideshow’s worth of familiar carnie types: the Alligator Man, the Mule-Faced Woman, the Midget Monkey Girl, the Human Blockhead, with the inevitable noggin full of nails.
