According to Variety, filmmaker Alex Ross Perry has acquired the film rights to Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel The Names.
Despite Delillo’s colossal standing within the literary community, his work has only been adapted to screen one before, in David Cronenberg’s brilliant Cosmopolis.
The book focus on several American expats in 1979 Athens who begin to investigate a cult fixated on semiotics who may be behind a string of mysterious murders.
Perry is one of the finest and most consistently surprising young filmmakers currently working, and his three previous features are heavily indebted to literary sources: his debut feature Impolex is a playful, no-budget adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow; The Color Wheel is highly influenced by the early comic novels of Philip Roth; and Listen Up Philip borrows its structure from William Gaddis’ The Recognitions.
In related and more bizarre news, Perry has also been hired to write a live-action Winnie the Pooh film.
