Ethan Coen’s road trip comedy picks up Margret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan
Wait, there’s another Coen brother? And he's also a director? Who knew!
Last winter, an up-and-coming filmmaker scored big with an Oscar-nominated adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s great works: The Tragedy Of Macbeth. The filmmaker was Joel Coen, and per Deadline, he’s got a younger brother who will also be making his first solo foray into movie-making this fall.
Ethan Coen, the other Coen, who everyone assumed was done making movies so he could direct plays, is back behind the wheel. Since completing his first documentary, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble In Mind, Coen is packing his bags and heading to Pittsburgh. His new movie, presumably, the long-gestating queer road trip comedy he wrote with wife Tricia Cooke in the mid-2000s, picked up two stars for the trip: Margret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan.
Many will recognize Qualley from Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood and the Netflix series Maid. Viswanathan, however, is a real get. After her breakout in Blockers, she starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe and Coen collaborator Steve Buscemi on TBS’ Miracle Workers.
The movie, which Coen and Cooke have been pushing uphill since 2007, is a road-trip comedy in the spirit of Russ Meyer, a “naughty comedy,” as Coen told the L.A. Times in 2007. Per the Pittsburgh Film Office, the movie starts shooting this fall.
Here’s how the Times described the plot back then:
When Marion, a skirt-chasing party girl, gets kicked out after her cop girlfriend finds her in bed with another woman, she convinces her buttoned-down friend Jamie to let her come along on a get-away-for-a-few-days drive-away car assignment from Philadelphia to Miami. Packed along for the ride are Jamie’s crush on Marion, Marion’s unrelenting desire to cruise every lesbian bar on the eastern seaboard, and — since this is Coen territory — a severed head in a hatbox, a mystery briefcase full of plaster phalluses, a melange of angry pursuers, an evil senator, a bitter ex-girlfriend and loads of hot boyless sex.
Now, it’s been about 15 years, and we’re willing to bet that the script has changed since then. We’re not even sure if this will be the same movie. However, the open casting call for the film describes it as “two queer young women in ‘99 on a road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee.” That certainly sounds like the same movie.
Are we finally going to see the lesbian road trip comedy that Coen fans have been clamoring for? We’ll keep our thumbs stretched to the sky with hopes of flagging down any updates.