When John Krasinski adapted David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it was clearly a personal labor of love, connecting with a book that resonated with him in college. Several other Wallace works have been adapted into stage plays—and The Simpsons even took Wallace’s iconic essay on cruise ship vacations as the inspiration for “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again.” But now is the point in the narrative of mythologizing late authors where a biopic goes into production.
Jason Segel is now set to play Wallace—though he’ll definitely need longer hair and a beard—in The End Of The Tour, an adaptation of Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky’s book Although Of Course You End Up Being Yourself, which recounts a five-day trip he took accompanying Wallace toward the end of his Infinite Jest book tour. Jesse Eisenberg will co-star as Lipsky. James Ponsoldt, director of Smashed and this year’s Say Anything pretender The Spectacular Now, will helm the adaptation from a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies (Dinner With Friends, Brooklyn Boy).
Ponsoldt apparently worked for Rolling Stone while he was in college, which forges a connection back to the material. But fear not for these Wallace adaptations picking up momentum on their way to an Infinite Jest film: Parks And Recreation’s Michael Schur still owns the right to that book, and it seems like he got them, purely so no one with superficial love for the material ever gets a chance.