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Orson Bean, who played Dr. Lester in Being John Malkovich, has died at age 91, after being struck by two cars in Los Angeles. Goddamn, imagine making it to 91, and then that happens?

Says Variety:

Orson Bean, the prolific character actor known for his work in “Being John Malkovich,” “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and a host of TV shows, died Friday after being hit by twice by cars while walking in Los Angeles. He was 91.

The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office told the Associated Press that Bean’s death was under investigation as a traffic-related fatality. The industry veteran was walking in the Venice area on Friday night when he was hit by a car and fell, after which he was hit by a second car, according to the AP. Bean’s survivors include his wife, actor Alley Mills, who he married in 1993.

Bean was a co-founder of the non-profit actors collective Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, where he also lived. Bean’s official bio on the theater’s website concludes with the observation: “He is one lucky son of a bitch.”

Bean was well-liked in the industry as a raconteur and versatile performer who was as comfortable on a game show set as he was in an arthouse movie such as Spike Jonze’s 1999 absurdist fantasy “Being John Malkovich,” in which he played Dr. Lester, the mastermind of a plot to prolong his life by inhabiting the body of the titular star. (Source)

Thanks to Doreen for the link.

BCKster Jeff sent this image through to me. Charlie's talk at the Sydney Goldstein Theater has been pushed back to July 13, "Due to the publication delay of his forthcoming novel, Antkind."

Charlie's American publishers' website lists July 7 as the new pub. date.

Charlie's Aussie publisher has it at May 18, but I expect that'll change, too.

If you're in San Francisco May 14, you can catch Charlie at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, where he'll be discussing his novel Antkind. YAY. Get in quick, though.

Says City Arts & Lectures: "Orchestra Tickets ($45) come with a copy of Kaufman’s new novel, Antkind."

UPDATE: This event has been rescheduled for July 13.

Had some computer problems, so I've been posting the last couple of updates on the FB and Twitter pages. This was one of those things: Charlie will be appearing with Susan Orlean at the Dynasty Typewriter At The Haworth At The Haworth, Los Angeles, on May 15. They'll be discussing Antkind, among other things. Not sure if there are tickets left, so get in quick.

UPDATE: it seems publication of Charlie's book has been delayed until July. Probably this means the event with Susan Orlean will be postponed as well, but I can't say for sure. If you're interested, you should call 'em and check.

In the U.S., Antkind will be published by Random House. In the UK and Australia (and probably other places), it'll be published by HarperCollins, which means we get a different cover.

Ta-da:

This is news to me, but apparently it's been known since around October. In the same month that Charlie publishes Antkind, his publisher will be releasing Memoirs and Misinformation, a Kaufman-sounding novel co-written by Jim Carrey and featuring Kaufman himself.

From Random House:

BCk is 18 years old! HAPPY BIRTHDAY BCK. WE OLD. December 18 is the official day, but I am late.

Speaking of late: to celebrate, here's a thing that I have taken waaaaay too long to upload, and which is of no use to you if you don't read French, but which is pretty damned neat if you do read French: Adaptation's screenplay, translated into French. This is based on the shooting script for the film published by Newmarket. Cool, no?! Oui!

Big thanks to Mark Roberts for painstakingly translating this thing and sharing it with us. FANTASTIC WORK. And BOOOO to me for taking so long to add it to the site. But yaaaay to me for keeping this thing going for 18 years.

A couple days after you read it here, Entertainment Weekly made it official:

[...] The Oscar-winning screenwriter behind such acclaimed cult-classics as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York, and Anomalisa has landed a deal with Random House to publish his debut novel, Antkind, EW can announce exclusively. The publisher, which originally acquired the book in 2012, describes it as a “mind-bending opus.”

[...]“There are no budgetary limitations in a novel,” [Charlie] said in a statement. “There is no studio oversight. There are no focus groups. In fact, this book is in part about that; it’s about an impossible movie.”

Ben Greenberg, VP and Executive Editor at Random House, adds: “I’ve been talking to Charlie about this novel for almost eight years and watching it change and recalibrate and grow. Antkind is a hilarious, devastating, epic mindf–k. I’ve never read anything else like it.” (Source)

They also exclusively reveal the cover BCK showed you a couple days earlier.

HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS, IT'S HAPPENING. There's a cover for Antkind now on Amazon and some of the other various bookselly sites. Not only that, there's now a plot outline for what we previously knew only as "an unfilmable novel about an impossible movie."

Says the blurb:

The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York.
 
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider—a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius.
 
All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être.
 
A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke. (Source)

This definitely sounds like what I was expecting. 720 pages, a little David Foster Wallace, a little Synecdoche, a little Frank or Francis, all Charlie K. Release date is still listed as May 20 next year, and there's a pre-order link. Even so, I wouldn't yet put money on that release date. THINGS CAN CHANGE.

Big big thanks to Tom!

GQ sat down with Jesse Plemons to talk Breaking Bad, Black MIrror and--among other things--I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

I don't know how much we're allowed to talk about this, but you're also in Charlie Kaufman's new movie, I'm Thinking Of Ending Things for Netflix. I read that book and... damn. It really scared me in a visceral way.

[Laughs.] Just wait. He Kaufman-ized it.

What did you think when you read it?

I thought I'd honestly never read anything like it. I read the script first. I was sitting at home, contemplating playing a robot in this other thing, and this just fell from the sky. I've been a huge fan of [Kaufman's] forever. I had a weekend with my friend where we started at the beginning and went through all his films and dissected them as much as you can. Synecdoche, New York... it's brutal.

This seems like a very difficult book to adapt, so I'm glad to hear it's maybe going to be even weirder.

I would say Charlie took maybe 15 percent of the dialogue. I don't know how this keeps happening... Not only working with people you respect but then them also turning out to be great human beings.

Have you seen Wild Rose with [co-star] Jessie Buckley? I'm gonna watch it on the plane ride home. She's unbelievable. Toni Collette and David Thewlis play my parents: The weirdest and best married couple of all time. (Source)