After a decade-plus break from filmmaking, Tim Robbins is returning to the director’s chair: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Robbins will helm an adaptation of Arthur Phillips’ short story Wenceslas Square. A spy romance set in Czechoslovakia near the end of the Cold War, Wenceslas Square was recently featured on This American Life, once more suggesting that—after the recent teaming of Paul Rudd, Errol Morris, and Ira Glass on a "You're As Cold As Ice" adaptation—This American Life is a fertile ground for potential movie ideas. Robbins' film version will be titled City Of Lies, as this is considerably easier to pronounce than “Wenceslas.”
Though Robbins has directed a few episodes of HBO’s Treme during his downtime (a fact which we recognize breaks the illusion that Treme is even directed at all, and not just a wrenching, life-scaled New Orleans docudrama unfolding in a real-time), City Of Lies marks his first feature since 1999’s Cradle Will Rock, which capped off a loose, liberal-minded triptych rounded out by 1992’s Bob Roberts and 1995’s widely lauded Dead Man Walking. Compared to most of these, a love story set on the dark side of the Iron Curtain could be considered light fare for Robbins.