Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

I don’t know how I missed this.

Someone wrote me a letter about some totally unrelated issue this week, and happened to mention something in passing, something I’d never heard mention of anywhere. I’ve spent the last few days asking around, and now I’m going to just toss this out there to anyone who might know anything, because I’m fascinated.

Is Neil Gaiman really writing a screenplay adaptation of Nicholson Baker’s wicked and brilliant THE FERMATA for Robert Zemeckis to direct at DreamWorks?

THE FERMATA is the story of a young man who discovers that every so often, he has the ability to drop into “The Fold,” as he calls it, a place where the world simply takes a breath, goes on pause. Sort of like in that Nickelodeon film earlier this year, CLOCKSTOPPERS, except there are no wacky spy hijinks or teen romance subplots. The main character in THE FERMATA uses the opportunity not to get rich or to necessarily benefit; instead, he uses it to satisfy the boundaries of the curiousity of his libido.

He uses it for sex.

The book, like Baker’s earlier VOX, is smart and funny and blisteringly filthy. I remember buying the book for my girlfriend at the time, and the two of us would get together to read it and laugh at the outrageousness of it all even as it worked on another level, leaving us... shall we say pleasantly bothered?. Baker’s one of those writers who manages to balance text and subtext with a magician’s ease, and the idea that Gaiman might be working to adapt his work is intriguing. They’re nothing alike as writers, aside from being keenly intelligent, perhaps. Gaiman’s always been fascinated with large tapestries, our shared stories and histories, and storytelling. Actually, I guess you could say Baker’s fascinated by storytelling, too. It’s just that his stories would make Larry Flynt blush at times.

Zemeckis is another fascinating possible match for the material. Inevitably, the book details what happens when you get bored with all the options available to you, and Zemeckis is at the point in his career where there’s not a script he can’t get, not a star he can’t hire, and not a toy he can’t get for his camera package. He can do anything he wants, and that means he’s had to genuinely confront the question: at that point, what do you do?

I’m going to cross my fingers and keep poking into this... oh, god, now that I’m thinking about Baker, that phrase sounded really, really dirty. What I mean is, I’m going to try to nail this down. I mean, I’ll dig in and see what I can uncover.

Oh, hell. I’ll find out if it’s happening.

I certainly hope it is.