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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)

Amazon UK now list Antkind's release date as 14 May 2020, with 336 pages.

Amazon US have it as 6 February 2020.

Both sites list Charlie as the author, and the temporary cover image lists William Mulligam as the author.

Why? I don't know. WHY?

But here's a thing: Antkind has a second page on Amazon US, where Random House is listed as the publisher, the release date is May 12, the page count sits at 752 (which is about what I'd expected from Charlie, to be honest), and there's no reference to William Mulligam. In the US, Charlie was originally slated to be published by Grand Central, a division of Hachette. Random House are an entirely different company. Has Charlie switched publishers? Is that somehow connected to the new William Mulligam image on the old Amazon page? Or has Amazon lost its mind? Or have I lost mine?

I Googled "William Mulligam" and only pages for this book came up. So then I Googled "Mulligam" by itself, and "Mulligam Syndrome" and "Mulligam Disorder," because Charlie likes weird mental disorders and has a hankering for giving characters names with hidden meanings (Synecdoche, New York's Caden Cotard was named for Cotard delusion, and Charlie originally wrote Anomalisa for the stage under the pseudonym Francis Fregoli, after Fregoli delusion)... but I came up with nothing.

Any ideas?

The good news is if you Google "Antkind," a whole load of publishers and bookstores show up in the results (e.g. HarperCollins here in Australia), which means Charlie's novel (OR WILLIAM'S) is so far still a thing that is actually happening. There are pre-order buttons here and there, but I wouldn't count on the release date until we see some marketing for the book.

Thanks to Livia, Jonah, Thomas, and u/staresAwkwardly on r/kaufman

It's no secret that Charlie got his "start" writing for sitcoms and other comedic TV series' in the 90s, and it's even less of a secret that most sitcoms from the 80s and 90s were pretty bloody awful, but what was it like writing for those shows?

Jay Abramowitz wrote for Full House, The Hogan Family and Mr. Belvedere, and today he stopped by Reddit for a fun and informative AMA.

Low overhead, my boy. Via the New York Post:

A Lower East Side condo owner turned his small apartment into a mini-village — by converting it into an illegal duplex with 11 sub-units that had ceilings as low as 4 ¹/₂ feet high, officials said Friday.

The illegal micro apartments at 165 Henry Street are so cramped that condo owner Xue Ping Ni even put up bubble wrap as protection to keep residents from hitting their heads on the many low-hanging pipes.

[...] “This is like the room out of the movie ‘Being John Malkovich,’” said Manhattan Councilman Ben Kallos — a nod to the “7th 1/2 floor” Manhattan office in the 1999 indie flick.

“It was funny in fiction, but a horror story in real life.” (Source)

Excellent. Terrible but excellent. Thanks to David!

Variety's David Cohen visited Starburns Industries to interview Carol Koch, Anomalisa's sculptor, and to learn how she turned sketches and directors’ notes into finished designs. The video is part of Variety's "Artisans" series.

Thanks to Julie!

I posted this on the FB page while the site was down. Here's Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water. In the village, there's a scale model of the town itself. Inside the model... there's a model of the model.

Thanks to Daniel for the tip!