'Go the Fuck to Sleep' Is About to Become a Goddamn Movie
Remember that children's book "Go the Fuck to Sleep" that came out a couple years ago? Samuel L. Jackson did a reading of it and Werner Herzog did a reading of it and it was so hot that it literally burned down all the bookshelves and Borders had to declare bankruptcy the company could not afford to rebuild its stores from the smoldering ashes wrought by this instant classic?
Well, Deadline reports that Fox 2000 is going to turn it into a movie. And people on the Internet are very worried about how that's going to happen, because the plot is too simplistic.
No doubt they feel discouraged by the monumental failures of movies built around boring stories like "a fish becomes lost," "a woman has bridesmaids," and "man starts newspaper." They note that the "Go the Fuck to Sleep" film's premise is "weak"; its one joke "worn out." They picture the opening shot of the movie—an exasperated father begging his baby to "go the fuck to sleep—and then imagine 82 minutes of awkward silence as he struggles to think of something else to say.
"How did they ever make a movie out of ‘Lolita'?" That's peaches. But how will they ever, ever make a movie out of ‘Go the Fuck to Sleep'?"
God knows. Maybe the film's lead character will be a little girl named "Thefuckto Sleep" and the movie will be about cheering on her soccer adventures; a Bend It Like Beckham-style romp through adolescence. ("How did they ever make a movie out of a girl who could bend it like Beckham?"). Maybe it will be an art film, an odd move for a major production company like Fox, and the "movie" will just consist of the words "GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP" blinking in scarlet letters thirty feet high, and none of the babies who see it will go to sleep, except the weird ones.
The book is being adapted by Ken Marino (of Wet Hot American Summer and Party Down) and his wife Erica Oyama Marino (who created the Bachelor parody web series Burning Love), who both have experience taking vague concepts and spinning them out into longer, movie-able things that people want to watch.
Will they be able to do that with Adam Mansbach's book?
Who the fuck knows?
