Rudin launches preemptive strike with Roth’s ‘Indignation’

Scott Rudin is on a shopping spree of Texas buffet proportions. Calling first dibs on a film adaptation of Philip Roth’s newest work Indignation, it doesn’t look like Rudin is going to stop diluting, err, “interpreting” literature anytime soon.

Roth, author of American Pastoral and Portnoy’s Complaint, is in familiar territory. His novel The Human Stain was a feature release in 2003. But, it took Rudin to say “I’ve been a maniacal fan of Roth’s for years and waited for the one [novel] I thought could really be a great movie.” So, the adaptations of Goodbye Columbus and The Dying Animal mean nothing to you, Rubin?

Roth’s Indignation is published by Houghton Mifflin and will be released in September of 2008. Like some of his other works, Indignation is a period novel, set in 1951. Roth is a Jersey boy, and Indignation finds 18-year-old Marcus Messner, son of a Kosher butcher in Newark, trying to escape anti-Semitism, sexual repression and the Korean War and travels far from Newark to attend Ohio’s Winesburg College.

Buying classics like A Confederacy of Dunces, I, Claudius and No Country For Old Men will probably continue to bring Rudin awards, accolades and generally pithy compliments but it’s ultimately a get-rich-quick scheme.

And Hollywood loves that.