Although Steve Carell playing “We Built This City” songwriter Dennis Lambert is still in the wait-and-see development stage, Vulture reports that he’s moving forward on another Warner Bros. project called Imagine, about “a sixty-something Bruce Springsteen-type rocker [who] discovers a long-unopened letter addressed to him from John Lennon,” in which said rocker learns that he fathered a son, to be played by Carell—suggesting Carell may pursue the sub-genre of “tangential rock ’n’ roll comedy” as his post-Office career. The film would be the directorial debut of Dan Fogelman, the screenwriter behind Cars and Bolt who’s recently moved on to more grown-up matters with Carell’s forthcoming Crazy. Stupid. Love., a “marital comedy” that just had its commas focus-grouped into (even more irritating, somehow) periods, as opposed to changing the title entirely to avoid any lingering association with Eat Pray Love, which is what was suggested in the focus group we just held in our office.
Anyway, Imagine: We’re not sure why anyone would 1) just sort of toss a letter from John Lennon aside like, “Oh, Lennon again. I’ll get to that later,” and then forget about it for thirty-something years, or 2) only learn that they fathered a son through John Lennon. Like, what does John Lennon have to do with that? Was he some sort of impishly Dickensian unseen benefactor? Or does he write the Bruce Springsteen-type rocker saying, “Milk And Honey is coming along great, can’t wait to get to the masters tomorrow. Oh yeah, remember that girl we ’double fantasy-ed’ last month? She’s got a wee brat now—black hair like yours, so I’m off the hook, old sport. Don’t tell Yoko”?